Chez Panisse

In 1971 Alice Waters opened a small restaurant in a house on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, with a menu that changed daily and a kitchen that cooked whatever the market and the season offered. It looked unremarkable and turned out to be the beginning of Californian cuisine. Chez Panisse is now the most consequential restaurant in America that was never trying to be famous, and its influence — on menus, on farming, on how a generation of cooks thinks about ingredients — is close to immeasurable.

Downstairs is the set menu: a single fixed dinner, four or five courses, printed fresh each day and built around whatever the growers and fishers have delivered. Upstairs, in the café, you can order à la carte under the same philosophy with less ceremony. The kitchen works largely over fire: lamb and beef grilled over oak, vegetables roasted until their sugars catch, dishes finished with good olive oil rather than technique. Nothing here is designed to photograph well. It is designed to taste of itself.

Samin Nosrat began in this building as a busser and ended up cooking in it, learning from Waters the habits that would become Salt Fat Acid Heat: taste constantly, buy the best ingredients you can find, respect the season, and let the fire do the work. The restaurant remains both a training ground and a standing argument for a way of eating that has since gone global. Book the downstairs menu well in advance; the upstairs café takes walk-ins and is the easier way in.

The series used Chez Panisse and its wood-fired hearth to explain caramelisation and smoke — the idea that applying heat well is the whole craft. It remains the right place to eat that lesson: a restaurant where the produce is the recipe, and where the menu is less a document than a record of what was good that morning.