Medium Raw

In fact, it’s Alice’s very hypocrisy that belies her true virtues. Because what’s truly wonderful about Alice is that she is, first and foremost, a sensualist. When you see Alice preaching about how you should be eating local—while nibbling on sea urchin roe from Hokkaido or foie gras from Gascony—at least you know she really appreciates the good stuff. It may be strategically foolish and inappropriate and bad for her argument to be seen cooking a fresh-laid organic egg over an open fire for Leslie Stahl—but I’ll bet it tasted fucking delicious.

What makes Alice Waters such a compelling character is her infectious enthusiasm for pleasure. She’s made lust, greed, hunger, self-gratification, and fetishism look good. When Alice shows you a bunch of radishes, you fucking want them. Where have those radishes been all my life? I need them!

Who cares if she knows the Heimlich maneuver? Did Gandhi know the Heimlich maneuver? Does Bono?

And skimming over the pages of a recent biography, I see there is the oft-cited charge that Alice has made a career of taking credit for the work of others.

To which I’d reluctantly have to ask: Exactly which chefs—to one extent or another—haven’t done that? How could the batty hippie chick have really been responsible for such an important era in gastronomy, is the implied question. Yet, so many male chefs have climbed or leaped to the top over the smashed bodies of subordinates and peers—without accruing fault or foul. The question lingers—and, along with it, I gather, some animus—because Alice survived and prospered where many of her original hippie contemporaries did not. She had the temerity to make money eventually. To figure out, or at least accept, that the Dream could not grow, much less survive, in a commune.

If you’re still looking to find “the True Genius behind the Whole Thing”—examining old menus at Chez Panisse, pre-Tower and post-Tower, for instance—you may as well be scrutinizing blurry photographs of the grassy knoll. There is, as with the Kennedy assassination, a case to be made for a second shooter. But spend too long looking and, in the end, you miss the point entirely.

Alice Waters is still here. Jeremiah Tower is not.

Alice is widely known—and will probably always be known—as the “Mother of Slow Food.” Jeremiah Tower allowed himself to become a footnote to history.

And history, as they say, will always be written by the victors.

13 Heroes and Villains

Fergus Henderson is a hero.

In the best heroic tradition, he’d be mortified to hear this. He’s English, for one—and painfully modest about all the adulation. His restaurant, St. John, was intended as an equally modest venture: a plain white room in a former smokehouse, where a few like-minded Englishmen could eat traditional English food and drink French claret. I am quite sure that his aspirations for the book Nose to Tail Eating (aka The Whole Beast in the United States), a collection of recipes and related musings, were even more limited.

Yet Nose to Tail is now considered one of the classic cookbooks of All Time, a collector’s item, a must-have for any chef anywhere in the world wanting cred from his peers, the Bible for the ever-growing “guts mafia,” the opening shot in an ongoing (if slow-motion) battle that’s still, even today, changing the whole world of food. St. John the restaurant, an undecorated white room serving barely garnished English country fare, continues to be lavishly (and, at times, ludicrously) over-praised: frequently named “one of the best restaurants in the world”—ahead of temples of haute gastronomy that are (technically) far more deserving of those kinds of official honors. I believe Fergus has even been honored by the Queen—for his service to the Crown—which is also crazy, if you think about it, for a one-time architect who dropped out and started cooking bistro grub, soon after to specialize in the kind of country-ass stuff his grandmother used to cook.

But he is a hero. That he’s my hero is well documented. Since my first meal at St. John, when I flopped onto my knees in the kitchen, babbling something spectacularly idiotic but heartfelt, like “You RAWK!!!” (Fergus wasn’t even there that evening), I’ve shamelessly basked in his reflected glory at every opportunity. I am a supporter, an acolyte, a devotee, an advocate for all things Henderson. I am a True Believer.