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(LIVING)
(Art en route to picture clients)
By MARIAN BURROS
c. 1984 N.Y. Times News Service
    NEW YORK - If Henri Soule can be credited with igniting the
explosion of fine French food in New York in the 1950s and 60s, then
Alice Waters, the owner and sometime chef of Chez Panisse in
Berkeley, Calif., deserves similar recognition for revolutionizing
American cooking in the 1970s and 80s.
    More than any other single figure, Miss Waters has been instrumental
in developing the exciting and imaginative style that has been
labeled New American Cuisine. Its trademarks - apparent in a wide
range of dishes that include such marvelous inventions as whole baked
garlic with white cheese and peasant bread, smoked trout and chervil
butter, and ragout of wild mushrooms with veal stock and red wine -
are an adventurous, often improvisational use of the finest American
ingredients and an exquisitely simple and straightforward approach to
their preparation.
    In the last five years Chez Panisse has spread its influence by way
of a family tree whose branches reach a number of the country's most
exciting new restaurants. Jonathan Waxman at Jams in New York; Mark
Peel at Spago in Los Angeles; Jeremiah Tower at Stars and Joyce
Goldstein at Square One, both in San Francisco, and Charlene Rollins
at the New Boonville Hotel in Boonville, Calif., all worked in the
Chez Panisse kitchens. So did Mark Miller of the Fourth Street Grill
in Berkeley; Carolyn Dille, a food writer and caterer who lives
outside Washington; Steven Sullivan of the Acme Bread Company in
Berkeley, Judy Rogers, who until earlier this year was the chef at
the Union Hotel in Benicia, Calif., and a half-dozen others who have
settled from the West Coast to Rome.
    The lessons they learned at Chez Panisse are manifested in different
ways. Mrs. Goldstein has turned her skills to improvising a variety
of ethnic dishes - gravad halibut cured with gin and juniper and
served with cucumbers and wasabi cream, for instance, and a salad of
spiced brisket of beef salad with vegetables and mint vinaigrette.
    Miss Rogers has continued the principle of simplicity, making
scalloped potatoes, for example, with the finest potatoes and
unpasteurized cream, instead of with the standard grated cheese,
old-fashioned spices and milk. ''Alice taught me to understand that a
simple thing, like grilled bread with aioli, was good enough to serve
in a fine restaurant,'' she said. ''So now you find simple things all
over.''
    Miss Waters quickly acknowledges her own debt to the French: Chez
Panisse began in 1971 as a French restaurant, emphasizing the earthy
cooking of Provence. But in time she began to experiment. Soon the
traditional dishes were lightened, and ingredients indigenous to
California were used. She insisted that those ingredients be
impeccably fresh and prepared to highlight, rather than mask, their
flavor.
    A meal at Chez Panisse last spring was a study in how simple
ingredients can be turned into remarkable dishes when left alone to
speak for themselves: baby lamb simply roasted and served with pan
juices; the restaurant's often-imitated warm goat cheese salad, with
lettuces only hours old; a delicate olive oil and Sauternes cake that
tasted as homey as the prize-winner at the county fair. The first
course, a soup of new garlic and eggplant served with a rouille, best
fits Miss Waters's description of her cooking: ''Not too esoteric,
not too intimidating. Sort of straightforward and, at its best,
surprising.''
    From the beginning, this philosophy has attracted talented,
creative, young people - most in their late 20s and 30s - who loved
good food and appreciated Miss Waters's intellectual approach to it.
Few had any formal culinary training. Her one-time partner and first
chef, Tower, had studied design at Harvard as an undergraduate and
graduate student. Others studied English literature, philosophy and
Chinese art history and anthropology. Mrs. Goldrtein was a painter.
    The atmosphere in the kitchen was hectic and frequently chaotic, but
those who came to work at Chez Panisse soon discovered that Miss
Waters was an exceptional teacher. Waxman, whose restaurant on East
79th Street in Manhattan is noted for its grilled foods and fresh
vegetables, says: ''She teaches by example, not by lecture. She is
not classically trained, but she is an intellectual chef. She
understands food and presents it in an alive and healthy manner.''
    Others found the lack of organization, the informality, stressful in
the beginning. ''It was difficult at first,'' said Mark Peel, now the
chef at Wolfgang Puck's innovative Los Angeles restaurant Spago.
     Peel arrived at Chez Panisse in 1980 with a degree in hotel and
restaurant management and became assistant pastry chef. ''I wanted to
work at Chez Panisse because it is a major force behind the return to
our culinary roots,'' he said. ''But it's not highly organized. There
is never-ending confusion, probably because of the creative process.''
    ''But,'' Peel added, ''it's very challenging. At Chez Panisse I
could do anything I wanted as long as it was very good. That's not
true in many restaurants.''
    In the case of Jeremiah Tower, who was Miss Waters's partner and
chef at Chez Panisse from 1972 to 1977, inspiration flowed in the
other direction. Initially, Miss Waters remembers, it was she who was
intimidated. ''He had a bold way of doing things,'' she said of
Tower, who is now co-owner of the Sante Fe Bar and Grill in Berkeley
and owner of the two-month-old Stars.
    
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NYT NEW YORK: old Stars.
    ''He was not hesitant,'' Miss Waters said. ''His cooking is more
elaborate than mine, more flamboyant and richer. I'm more garlic and
olive oil - he's more cream and butter. But initially I was
fascinated by his combinations, things I wouldn't have thought of.''
    ''My improvisational cooking evolved after he left,'' she said.
    ''Mainly,'' Tower says, ''we had fun together. Alice has a wonderful
sense of how to eat.''
    In many ways, Miss Waters feels, the ultimate extension of the Chez
Panisse philosophy is the New Boonville Hotel in Boonville, Calif., a
tiny town three hours north of San Francisco. There Charlene Rollins,
who worked at Chez Panisse in 1978, and her husband, Vern, are living
out Miss Waters's dream.
    ''It's an idea we've fantasized about,'' Miss Waters said. ''Raising
everything ourselves. But it's outrageous to try to do it on a
shoestring without ever having been in the restaurant business
before.''
    ''I had the quintessential BLT sandwich there, made with their own
rolls, with mayonnaise using yolks from their own chickens, bacon
from their own pigs, crushed garlic, lettuce and tomatoes from their
own garden,'' she said.
    Despite her contribution to the American cooking revolution, the
40-year-old Miss Waters, who was once a Montessori School teacher,
has never taken a formal cooking lesson. She opened Chez Panisse with
$10,000 so that friends who dropped by to eat what she cooked ''would
pay me for it and I could stop teaching school,'' she said recently.
    
    The following recipes are from ''The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook,''
by Alice Waters (Random House).
    
Olive Oil and Sauternes Cake
     5 whole eggs
     2 egg whites
      3/4 cup sugar
     1 tablespoon mixed grated orange and lemon peel
     1 cup sifted flour
      1/2 teaspoon salt
      1/2 cup good-quality Sauternes
      1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil.
    1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
    2. Separate the 5 eggs and beat the yolks with the sugar in a bowl
with a whisk about 3 to 5 minutes, until light-colored and
well-beaten. Add the orange and lemon peel and set aside.
    3. Combine the flour and salt and then add bit by bit to the sugar
and egg mixture, beating continually until they are incorporated. Add
the Sauternes and the olive oil in the same fashion.
    4. Beat all 7 egg whites until they stand in stiff peaks. Fold them
into the mixture thoroughly.
    5. Pour this batter into an 8-inch spring-form pan that has been
well buttered inside and lined on the bottom with parchment or wax
paper. Bake for 20 minutes, rotating the cake if necessary to insure
even cooking. Lower the oven to 325 degrees and bake for 20 minutes
more. Turn off the oven, cover the cake with a round of buttered
parchment and close the oven for 10 minutes more, while the cake
deflates like a fallen souffle.
    6. Remove the cake from the oven, invert it onto a flat surface,
remove the spring-form pan and allow it to cool completely. It can be
stored, well sealed, in the refrigerator. Serve with fresh peaches
and a glass of Sauternes.
    Yield: 6 servings.
Red Potato and Red Onion Gratin
     2 pounds red potatoes
     3 medium-size red onions
      1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons light olive oil
     2 to 3 sprigs fresh thyme
     Salt and pepper
     2 tablespoons unsalted butter.
    1. Peel the potatoes and slice them  1/4 inch thick into a bowl with
plenty of cold water. Keep them covered by 1 inch of water, changing
the water as it becomes starchy. The number of changes depends on the
potatoes; three to four times is usual.
    2. Peel the onions and slice  1/4 inch thick. Cook in 3 tablespoons
olive oil with the thyme over very low heat. Cover the pan, but stir
occasionally. The onions should be sweet, slightly softened and still
crunchy after 10 minutes. Remove from the heat, uncover and set aside.
    3. Rinse the potatoes in a colander and pat them very dry between
tea towels. Toss them in the remaining olive oil.
    4. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
    5. Layer a lightly oiled shallow earthenware casserole, 2 to 3
quarts, with potatoes slightly overlapping in concentric circles, and
salt and pepper lightly. Remove thyme from the onions and strew some
of the onions lightly over the layer of potatoes. Continue layering
and seasoning the potatoes. End with a layer of potatoes.
    6. Dot with the butter and bake in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes
until the potatoes are a deep golden brown.
    Yield: 6 servings.
    
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