“I think California cooking is a philosophy and a way of living your life. It isn’t just about the food. It’s about all the values of the culture—the artist and production, the terroir, the rituals of the table. That’s the beauty of being around for forty years. You can see that we have succeeded in a certain way. It’s beautiful to see this next generation of kids—they’re completely committed, they’re going to do it right, [whereas] the French and the Italians, they’re having a hard time holding on to their hats and hoes these days.” (Ironically, although in the early days many California cuisine chefs looked to Europe for inspiration, today long-standing cooking traditions there are being eroded by common market regulations and fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s and Wendy’s, which are replacing cafés and tavernas.)
Although Alice admired Old World values, she had a modern belief in job sharing and allowed chefs to split their duties, starting in 1987 in the Café, when David Tanis and Catherine Brandel shared the chef position, each working three days a week. Later Tanis and Jean-Pierre Moullé divided their responsibilities from 2004 to 2011, each working in six-month stints. Alice wanted her staff to be able to live well-rounded, balanced lives, but she toiled tirelessly herself. “When you’re talking about being there from 7:00 in the morning, you don’t have any other life. I never left Chez Panisse, and I never knew what was going on in the world, I never went to a movie. All I got to see were Carrie’s flower arrangements and everybody’s tired faces.”
I did not set out to write an encomium to Alice, but I’ve got to hand it to her. She drove the train of the ingredient revolution. I cannot tell you how many times her name came up while I was interviewing farmers, artisans, and chefs whom she supported and pushed to do more and better. We all have profited from her persistence and passion. She’s stuck to her guns despite criticism that she’s overly idealistic and elitist: “I think people have criticized me about being uncompromising, and I don’t regret it for one single second.”
Under the influence of the counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement, the 1970s saw the emergence of several best-selling vegetarian cookbooks, including the Tassajara Bread Book (1970) and later Tassajara Cooking (1986), both by Edward Espe Brown of the San Francisco Zen Center, Anna Thomas’s Vegetarian Epicure (1972), which became the bible for many vegetarians, and Laurel’s Kitchen (1976), by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey. Macrobiotic diets were in vogue, especially in the new communes of the era. Health food stores and food cooperatives opened, followed by small vegetarian restaurants. One of the first was the Shandygaff restaurant on Polk Street in San Francisco in 1970, where Mollie Katzen trained before moving to Ithaca, New York, to help found Moosewood Restaurant. Dipti Nivas was opened in 1973 by Deborah Santana, the then wife of legendary guitarist Carlos Santana, and her sister Kitsuan. At most of these places the food was earnest and well-meaning but rather heavy, combining grains and legumes to make complete proteins, garnished with nuts and seeds and accompanied by heaps of steamed vegetables sauced with tahini and tamari. Greens Restaurant, which opened in 1979, departed from the brownrice- and-veggies model by serving elegant vegetarian food in a beautiful setting on the San Francisco Bay.
ANNIE SOMERVILLE
Greens Restaurant, San Francisco
Annie Somerville has been the chef at Greens, a groundbreaking vegetarian restaurant at Fort Mason, for thirty years. The restaurant was opened in 1979 by the San Francisco Zen Center with Deborah Madison as the chef and meditation students as the staff. Initially, Greens served only lunch, but within a few months the restaurant had proved so successful that it began serving two prix fixe dinners that changed nightly. Annie was brought on to assist Deborah in 1981 and became executive chef in 1985 after Deborah left to do a rotation at the Tassajara meditation retreat. Annie hadn’t planned to become a chef, but she grew to love the work.
“In the early days, if we had polenta, the menu would say in parentheses, ‘A northern Italian staple,’ or for phyllo, if it was a savory phyllo dish, it would say, ‘Not a dessert.’ We had to let people know that these dishes were something other than what they might expect. Over the years the cuisine has evolved, but many of those original dishes are still on the menu, like the wilted spinach salad, because it’s so popular.”
Much of Greens’ produce came, and still comes, from the Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm in Marin, which has been farmed organically since its founding in 1972. The remainder is purchased from neighboring farms and markets. Annie declared, “For me, California cooking is seasonal, local, and organic as much as possible. I think the big part is buying from people I know, [witnessing] the cycle, the web of life. It starts with the person planting the seed, growing the produce, producing the olive oil, producing the cheese. We help support that effort, the wineries as well. Our goal is to cook with the produce of as many small local growers as we possibly can.”
The first Tasting of Summer Produce, a trade show for specialty crop growers and retail and restaurant buyers, was held at Greens in 1983. Eventually the event grew so big that in 1986 it moved to the Oakland Museum. “The phrase ‘farm to table’ is recent,” said Annie, “but we have been doing it for a long time. We know these growers and are connected to them and committed to buying from them and supporting them even when it hasn’t been the best crop.”
Like many Bay Area chefs, Annie did not go to cooking school but instead learned on the job. As she put it, “I’ve gone to cooking school at Greens Restaurant. As my husband says, this is where I got my PhD. And I’m still working on it. One of the great things that you said to me, Joyce, was, ‘Working in the restaurant keeps you young,’ because you’re working with great young people. All of these super young people, that’s the lifeblood of the restaurant.”
Rather than being shaped by cooking school or experience abroad, Annie’s culinary ideas come from living in the Bay Area. “I’m not a big traveler,” she said. “While I love the idea of spending time in Italy and France and other countries, I don’t do much of that. My inspiration is focused on learning from what I read about what other chefs are doing and what I experience other chefs doing when I go to their restaurants.”
Annie is also energized by her visits to the farmers’ market, as much by the people she meets there as by the produce. “One of the wonderful experiences I have every week at the Ferry Plaza farmers’ market is with Stan Keena of Petaluma Farms—Stan the egg man. I always call him ‘your egg-cellency.’ I ask his egg-cellency how he is, and he says, ‘I am egg-static to see you.’
“What’s also fun about going to the farmers’ market is talking to home cooks, the shoppers who are passionate about buying leeks or carrots from a particular grower. What I try to do every day is to impart that enthusiasm and excitement for these ingredients to our staff. Our diners expect to be challenged a little bit, [to get] excited about something they may not have seen before. These days that’s getting harder because there’s so much exposure to food.”
Annie sees Greens as much more than a vegetarian restaurant. “At Greens we’ve been very fortunate to be in this location in continuous operation all these years, a part of the whole food culture. What we’re doing here is nothing new in the world. This is the real way to eat. The cuisines of the world produce beautiful dishes made with vegetables [that aren’t] necessarily called vegetarian. I think what we’ve done is to make that accessible to the dining public, whether people are vegetarian or not.”
Specials at Greens Restaurant, October 6, 1979, at a time when gorgonzola still had to be identified for the diner.
Counterculture cooks in Northern California cared about quality, connecting with local farmers and ranchers, and supporting sustainable agriculture. “Small is beautiful” was part of the zeitgeist. In his