If you live in California, you probably know the deal with Chez Panisse already, but allow me to give you a refresher just in case. It was founded in 1971 by the now legendary chef Alice Waters, enemy of microwave ovens and godmother of a farm-to-table movement that is now so widespread that your average mall restaurant will claim to be part of it. It uses only locally sourced ingredients, changing its menu every night to accommodate for the availability of those ingredients. If you want to give credit to anyone for transforming America from a land of mayonnaise casseroles and Jell-O molds to a country that actually cares about what it eats, Chez Panisse is a good place to start.

SFGATE sent me to Chez Panisse to determine whether the restaurant has kept up with the very revolution it spawned. A grueling assignment to be certain, but I accepted it all the same.

Chez Panisse is split into two restaurants. Its upstairs cafe, which is where I finagled a seat, has an a la carte menu and is the more affordable option, if you consider $35 entrees to be affordable. The downstairs plays home to the formal restaurant, which has a rotating set menu every night that costs $175 per person, booze not included. Nothing on the formal restaurant’s menu looks objectionable. How many Silicon Valley executives and Los Angeles film producers have eaten at the cafe but demanded to order s—t off the formal restaurant menu? All of them. 

Before leaving my hotel, I called my mom to tell her where I would be dining out for the evening. My mom was an acolyte of Waters’ revolution. During my childhood, she evolved from serving us Hamburger Helper for dinner to braised chicken with poached pears for dessert. She still has a copy of the Chez Panisse cookbook, which she bought decades ago, in her kitchen. My goal with this phone call was to make her horribly, horribly jealous.

I failed. She’d already eaten at the mother restaurant decades ago, near the peak of its virality. What’s more, she didn’t think much of it. “It wasn’t that impressive,” she told me, before twisting a knife in Waters’ escarole. “It was nothing, really.” Maybe I should’ve turned down this assignment and grabbed a burrito instead.

Views inside of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, Calif. (SF Chonicle via Getty Images)
Views inside of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, Calif. (SF Chonicle via Getty Images)

But I didn’t. I walked along the main drag of Shattuck Avenue before coming upon a two-level Craftsman surrounded by enough landscaping to count as its own ecosystem. I didn’t need a shingle hanging above the door to know I had found the place. I went upstairs and immediately felt an ease that one only usually feels if they have $5 million stashed away in an offshore account. I was surrounded by warm wood paneling, soft lighting, piano music playing at the exact right volume, white tablecloths, and servers who didn’t walk so much as they sashayed from the kitchen to the dining room and back again. This was one of the most confident restaurants I’d ever entered, and the next hour of my life would prove why.

I sat down and eagerly pored over Chez Panisse’s offerings. My ordering game was tight. Everything on this menu was predictably tempting, but I kept my focus. I knew I wanted the smoked black cod as an app. I knew I wanted rhubarb galette for dessert. And while I was torn between the duck and the pappardelle with basil-walnut pesto for an entree, I knew, on instinct, that my server would tell me which item he actually preferred, and not merely which item was selling poorly that evening.

The server sashayed his way over, not a hair on his head out of place. Right away, we hit it off. I love to hit it off with my server. Makes me feel charming. I asked him which entree he preferred, and he didn’t hesitate. He loved the pappardelle. It wasn’t an item that knocked you out when described on the page, but some of my greatest ordering mistakes had come when I passed on a seemingly boring dish that a great restaurant could make extraordinary. I wasn’t making that mistake again. I ordered the pasta and, to keep our flirtation up, asked him his opinion on the galette for dessert, even though I already knew I was gonna order it.

“I love it, but I’m a bit biased!” he said, with a chuckle.

“I am here for your bias,” I told him. “Your bias matters.” I almost wanted to ask him out, even though I was faithfully married and also not gay. Instead, I asked for an elderflower spritzer as my kickoff mocktail and then eagerly watched him scamper off to place my order.

You can always judge a restaurant by its bread basket. Some restaurants give you day-old French bread they got at a local Safeway. Some have a bread boy walk over to your table, using a pair of shiny tongs to dole out a selection of fancy multigrain and white rolls, like he’s selling cigarettes at a speakeasy in 1923. Some give you pita bread tastefully cut into wedges, like a sad pizza. Some give you no bread at all. And some give you bread only if you pony up an extra $8. At Chez Panisse, I got a complimentary basket of country bread that was nice and spongy on the inside, with a good chewy crust. I smeared it with fresh salted butter and sipped on my spritzer, spontaneously thinking of things to celebrate in my head: my daughter finishing her AP tests, my marriage, Dan Snyder officially agreeing to sell his team on this same day, etc.

I scanned the room, and everyone else seated had a similarly festive glow to them. While Chez Panisse is in Berkeley, its clientele is clearly at arm’s length from both the city and perhaps its ideals. This was an older crowd. A moneyed crowd. The dress here was casual, as California culture mandates, but these people themselves were anything but. Airlift them all to Nantucket and they wouldn’t have looked out of place. If any of them had gone to UC Berkeley, they acquired Stanford brain not long thereafter anyway. Don’t let Chez Panisse’s history, or its philosophy, fool you. This is a restaurant for rich people. It is exclusive in all the naughtiest ways.

And I loved every second I was inside. I’m not afraid to confess in this space that I love fancy s—t. I love Sevruga caviar. I love luxe hotel rooms. I loved Veuve Clicquot before alcoholism struck and I remanded myself to fancy soda, like the elderberry spritzer. And I love restaurants like this one, where every day feels like IPO day.

So I luxuriated in my time at Chez Panisse, eating my smoked cod at a reasonable speed, which was wise because there were only about five bites of it. I even ate the beets accompanying the cod even though I normally hate beets. When I finished my app, I asked my hero server — and this was the first time I’d ever done this in my life — to actually wait until I’d finished my second mocktail before serving me my entree. I wanted to sit. I wanted to breathe in the rarefied air. I regretted that I had to eat here alone but little else. After all these years, this place still makes its customers feel amazing.

Then I got hungry and told the server that no, I actually wanted my food now. He obliged. Soon, I was presented with a plate of pasta that tasted as bright as it looked. If you’re an American, you’re used to brown food. We even have a whole holiday built around it. But when you taste bright food, you know the difference just as surely as you know the difference between rich and poor. This dish was so light, in fact, that I openly flirted with ordering a second entree, that duck, once I’d finished. But I didn’t because that would have been too gauche. I had succumbed to Waters’ aggressive modesty, and THAT I would later regret.

But first, dessert. Out came my rhubarb galette, with a candied glaze on its crust that must have been milked from the horn of a unicorn. I ate it in five bites. To finish the meal, I asked my server for a decaf cappuccino with oat milk.

“We actually don’t have oat milk,” he told me. I was stunned. Of ALL the restaurants not to have oat milk, man. No matter. I got my ‘cino with common milk, sucked it down, and then quickly ordered another. I got my check (about $150, without alcohol) and floated back out into the California sun, immensely pleased with my life. If you’re young, you might find this kind of restaurant underwhelming, perhaps a touch pretentious. Fortunately for me, I am NOT young. I am now a man of wealth and taste, which means I can walk into a place like Chez Panisse and feel like it was built for me and me alone. I felt pampered. I felt well cared for. I felt like a billionaire.

I also still felt hungry and strangely unsatisfied. If there was any heat in my dinner — save for a dash or two of black pepper — it eluded me. The spice levels at Chez Panisse could have fueled a thousand Paul Mooney jokes and perhaps did once upon a time. While this restaurant remains fanatically devoted to the California cuisine that it helped pioneer, it doesn’t seem to have accounted for the ways in which California, along with its dining options, has changed since the restaurant’s opening half a century ago. 

This is not revolutionary food anymore. Quite the contrary. It’s very traditional and, at times, painstakingly white. I loved everything I ate, yet so much felt missing. I should’ve ordered that second entree. I probably should have ordered a third. But even then, I don’t think I would’ve gotten quite what I was looking for. What had I eaten on this night? Nothing, really. Looking back, I think I liked the bread more than anything else I had. If I ever eat here again, it will be for lunch, because then I know I won’t go to bed hungry.

When I left Chez Panisse, I went right to an ice cream parlor to pack in extra calories. It still wasn’t enough. I’d remain hungry all the way through the next night, when I stumbled into a neighborhood Mexican joint, also on Shattuck, called Taqueria La Familia. I ordered a wet chile verde burrito — the kind of monster burrito you tell yourself you can’t possibly eat all of and then do anyway. I ate it all. It wasn’t the greatest burrito I’d ever eaten, but it was somehow the most necessary one. It had spice, and it cost me $12.50. That’s almost nothing for a whole lot of something. My mother would have approved.