The restaurant that launched California cuisine. Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971 on Shattuck Avenue, named after a character in Marcel Pagnol's Marseille films, with the aim of cooking simple French-influenced food from local ingredients sourced directly from farmers. That philosophy — which now seems obvious — was genuinely radical at the time, when American fine dining meant frozen produce and classical French technique.
The menu changes daily and is set — one prix-fixe dinner in the downstairs restaurant, a simpler à la carte menu in the upstairs cafe. Reservations for the downstairs are made weeks in advance. The cafe is more accessible, though still requires booking.
Gourmet magazine named it the best restaurant in America in 2001. It trained a generation of chefs who went on to define West Coast cooking. Whether it lives up to the reputation on any given night depends on the night, but the setting — a converted brown-shingle house in a quiet residential block — is exactly right for what it does.