Results tagged “alicewaters”

Maybe New York chef David "Fist Bump" Chang was right? Scroll down, folks.

We want to prompt our new "Earth to Alice" feature by saying this: we love Waters. We love her hat. We love Chez Panisse. We love Waters as a revolutionary icon. We love the way she uses the tines of a fork to carefully mince garlic so as not to bruise the oil. We love her breathy voice. We love her as one of the most important philosophers of our time. We just love her for being her. (Anthony Bourdain, we should point out, is not a philosopher. He is a Wally George-like on-air personality who cooks things.)

Alice Waters (Chez Panisse founder, slow food movement high priestess, mafia Donna) is set to receive France's esteemed Legion of Honor (). Does she to it? Yes, she does. Maybe even one of those Nobel trinkets too. See, many moons ago, Waters took a plump clove of garlic to the tines of a fork so as not to bruise the oil (or so we like image) and, voila, history was made. Now the famous (and infamous) food philosopher, according to SF Weekly's Meredith Brody, could receive the medal at any moment. "As of this morning, assistant Varun Mehra didn't yet know when his boss would be getting the award or where -- he's been trying to get in touch with the French Consul General in S.F. to learn more," Brody reports. (Other notables who have received the Legion of Honor? Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, Quincey Jones, Giorgio Armani, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, and-- but of course -- Celine Dion.) Congratulations, Alice. Shark fin soup for everybody!

HuffPo writer and author of TASTE (a cooking blog!) Isabel Cowles has come down on Out Patron Saint of Organic Sprigs Alice Waters. She says what most people are afraid to say about Waters and the slow food movement: it's too expensive. Cowles says, "If Ms. Waters is serious about changing the national food system for all Americans, she needs to get down and dirty on the economic issues tied to her edible ethos. At present, the food Waters espouses--clean, local and organic--is not sustainable to the American wallet." Too true. If Waters can address this issue -- which she really should do; tell us this economic climate is a surmountable challenge to live an organic lifestyle, or just tell us po' folk to stick to our Sonic burgers -- this fresh food philosophy might be a tad more accessible. Until then, we'll be sticking to the 'conventional' produce section at Whole Foods.

Soft spoken Chez Panisse and SFM founder Alice Waters is a genius. Really, who minces garlic with the tines of a fork so as not to bruise the oil? Alice does, that's who. Now Waters can add semi-hero to her resume. At a party for the Art.Food.Hope inaugural event for DC Central Kitchen and Martha’s Table, Waters, according to Eater, "bursts into the room, asking if anyone knows the Heimlich maneuver, as cookbook author Joan Nathan [was] choking." Top Chef's Tom Colicchio, however, came to the rescue, performing the gut-punching act on Nathan. What a guy. That said, chefs and restaurant owners really should be trained in the Heimlich maneuvering arts, yes? Yes.

• Chez Panisse mafia don Alice Waters speaks to Charlie Rose. [Eater]
• Your alt weekly lawsuit word count. [Guardian 796, SF Weekly 1,559]
• SFPD deputy chief demoted. [SFGate]

San Francisco is really behind on the inane most-expensive food item trend. Serendipity-3, a restaurant in New York, just unveiled to the public (well, mainly for the benefit of Guinness World Records) the world's most expensive dessert. The Frrrozen Haute Chocolate was declared the most expensive dessert in the world on Wednesday by Guinness World Records. The dessert is a frozen, slushy mix of cocoas from 14 countries, milk and 5 grams of 24-carat...

The bay area Michelin Guide 2008 is out, and there’s not much changed from last year: the French Laundry is the only place with 3 stars (the most) in the wider bay area. Aqua and Michael Mina are the only 2 stars in the city. Those Michelin guys are so stingy with stars, Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters still clutches her lonely one. Jean-Luc Naret, the director of the Michelin guide, was handing out press copie this morning at a brunch at Bloomingdale’s. He was ebullient. We asked him about last year belly dancers controversy, and he was like, but they were there, the inspector saw them! It was “a writing error,” he added, “not a rating error.” We do writing errors all the time too! We can totally relate.

When you live in a neighborhood overrun by donut purveyors and nail shops, with a fair number of fairly unappetizing Chinese restaurants sprinkled in between, the arrival of a new joint featuring a new regional cuisine is cause for at least a little salivation.

It's the third annual San Francisco Notable Portrait Auction, to benefit Creativity Explored! We love this event. Creativity Explored is dedicated to promoting works by local developmentally disabled artists, and they invite a group of local celebs to sit for portraits by their artists, and then auction them off with the celebs in attendance. Jonathan Richman (!!!!) will also be playing.

Total number of people pictured in this week's Swells society column: 100. (It's all pictures and captions this week, with no dishy Catherine Bigelow text, we're sorry to report.)

We gobble the various food sections up each Wednesday. These are our favorite tidbits from today's offerings:

The new Michelin was stingy with stars for San Francisco: no 3 stars restaurants (the only one in the wider bay area being the French Laundry in Napa), two 2 stars (Aqua and Michael Mina), and a 12 one stars (Fleur de Lys, La Folie, the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Rubicon, Bushi-Tei, Quince, Range, Acquerello, Masa's, Gary Danko, Boulevard, Fifth Floor). Alice Waters got only one tiny puny star for her Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Spanked!

We're tired of lying to the San Francisco fooderati: We used to hate goat cheese. There. We've said it. Happily, we came to our senses nine years ago and now we promote the chalky, salty flavor of caprine milk with all the passion of a new convert.

We just received last week the Slow Food Guide to San Francisco and the bay area, third guide in the series after New York and Chicago. The Bay Area is in smaller font in the actual title, but the guide actually makes a great job at not discriminating against the South and East Bays. We love Slow Food. Our s.o.'s roommate, Valerie, used to head the Berkeley chapter and many times we would step into a chapter meeting in the living room, which really was a yummy potluck of all-organic, all-sustainable delicious recipes. And they would let us take a bite, thank you very much, they won our heart the old fashioned way, through the belly. We were out when Alice Waters visited, but we knew the house had been touched by the Slow Food equivalent of a divinity, it had a halo from that day on. Both our s.o. and Valerie have moved out of the holy shrine by now, but Slow Food is still thriving.

To get us out of the house, we need more than the promise of comfort food. We have all the comfort we want at home, what with running water and in-house sanitation. We can cook up a comfort storm in our kitchen, should we want boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin or mac&fromage. We'll make exception to any rule, of course, but to get our little tushes in a seat in a restaurant, we require something a bit more appealing. It could be something exotic, our pantry is bare of ethnic spices and rubs, or it could be something exciting: Winterland.

California cuisine means something different to everyone. Some equate it with local, artisanal producers. Some cast it as a Mediterranean cuisine realized with California ingredients and American techniques. But for us, it all comes down to the fennel. Every chef who's come through Chez Panisse's kitchens uses this anisey, wintergreen-colored vegetable. We're pretty sure that if you made a pizza with grilled fennel, meyer lemon-infused artisanal olive oil, and rocket, the space-time continuum would collapse and Alice Waters would magically appear in your kitchen.

We loved the empty marketplace we found at the Ferry Building on a soggy New Year's Eve day. Few buyers wanted to come out on the wet holiday. Sadly, many farmers felt the same way, and the thriving market was a shadow of its normal self. Ah, well, we still found some bright green Brussels sprouts to take home for dinner.

Certain summer fruits—tomatoes and peaches come to mind—are poster children for farmer's markets. When these ingredients are bound for the supermarket, they're picked way too early and stored in taste-damaging conditions.

, "the color combinations can be striking." All the pretty peppers at the market are in the species , but there are two main subdivisions: sweet peppers and chili peppers. We'll give you some ideas for sweet peppers this week, but next week we'll gird our tongues for chili pepper recipes. If you've got any suggestions (for cooking or girding), let us know.

Bon Appétit readers may remember the "Entertaining at Home" articles: Buffy and Chip invite their dashing and witty friends over for a casual dinner in a Manhattan loft. Or in their Long Island farm house. Or their Swiss chalet. Back when we subscribed, we daydreamed about the perfect life depicted in those features. We eyed the Smoked Trout with Cucumber-Watercress Cream and thought that maybe if we made it often enough, we could conjure an airy loft or movie star friends. As we became older and wiser, or at least more cynical, the pieces annoyed us with their unattainable standards and fluffy content. When one article featured—we swear to Alice Waters—a group of friends using their to get to a favorite picnic spot, we threw the issue across the room and canceled our subscription.

Stacey over at Contraversion links to a hilarious spread in the New York Times magazine. The picture you're looking at is not the work of some photoshop geek. That is a real tattoo on the arm of a real chef who obviously adores Alice Waters. Why? Chef Nino Mancari of Delaware's Fish On! explains: ''I wanted to do a tribute to American food...'Eventually I'll get James and Julia, and with Alice it'll be the holy trinity.''

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