Chez Panisse\’s \
Sigh. I used to live not far from Chez Panisse and remember fondly when the café (upstairs) opened: friends of my friends worked there, as servitors and also bakers. This was when I was in my baking and cooking phase, and wanted to go pro, something I did achieve in NYC not long after, as a baker. But in Berkeley, early 80s, I’d go to the Café often–free or very inexpensive food, see, and it was good–and very seldom (like, never) to the restaurant below. That luxury was deferred until years later, when I could actually afford it. And by which time, alas, my passion for food had been subsumed by my passion for bike racing and running….
But my passion for cooking, and for tasting, has oddly returned. I spend the time I’m not thinking of politics, economics, law, copyright, open source, management, on recipes, combinations, tactics, styles of cooking and food preparation. And to say that there is a coherence to all this is simply to state what is obvious–to me, for so long, to more and more; and it has nothing really to do with middle-class gourmet-gulch fantasies of political importance. I hope.
newspeak 