Fire Damages Chez Panisse
By EMILY WEINSTEIN and CAROL POGASH
3:12 p.m. | Updated
A fire broke out early Friday morning at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’s pioneering restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., made famous by its embrace of local foods. The fire, which was reported at 3:04 a.m., badly damaged the restaurant’s porch and facade. No one was injured.
“The very beautiful facade of the restaurant is gone,” said Ms. Waters, who spoke Friday morning from her home in Berkeley, just after returning from Chez Panisse, which she opened with partners in 1971. “The fire started under the front porch, and it just burned the whole front porch off. We were very lucky that it happened in the middle of the night and that no one was there. But it’s gone.”
Avery Webb, acting deputy chief of the Berkeley Fire Department, said the damage was estimated at $200,000. He cautioned that that was “a very preliminary estimate.” The cause of the fire is under investigation, though he said that firefighters found electrical equipment in the area of the fire’s origin.
During the cool, gray morning, passers-by in Berkeley stopped to look at the damage done to the wisteria-laden house whose kitchen had an outsize impact on American cooking. A white-haired man said he had been dining at Chez Panisse for 40 years. A younger woman said it was at the restaurant that she shook the hand of the Dalai Lama.
There is no structural damage to the building. The main dining room on the first floor, the kitchen and the upstairs cafe were spared, with most of the restaurant’s redwood and copper design, a blend of Art Deco, arts and crafts and Alpine motif, surviving intact. Its designer, Kip Mesirow, who now lives in Vermont, called Ms. Waters and offered to help in the effort to redesign any damaged areas.
The fire was mostly confined to the enclosed porch, which seated 8 to 10 people. Rose-colored bay windows were smashed, wood framing was exposed, and insulation and charred pieces were heaped in a pile inside the property’s wooden gates.
What saved the restaurant, Ms. Waters said, was its sprinkler system; a large sprinkler head poured water on the porch, preventing the fire from spreading. Mr. Mesirow had disguised the head within a large light fixture so, as she said, the look of it wouldn’t bother her.
Ms. Waters hopes to open the cafe quickly, thanks in part to business-interruption insurance her father insisted on buying for the restaurant in 1981. (She had resisted, claiming it was too expensive. “He saved the restaurant,” she said.)
“But the downstairs — I don’t know how we could really make it right for quite some time,” she said. “I think we really have to think about what we’re going to do. And maybe there’s a silver lining. Maybe we can make a few more seats out on the front porch. That part will have to be entirely rebuilt.”
For now, the restaurant is canceling all reservations through March 23. Since Chez Panisse relies so heavily on fresh ingredients, Jennifer Sherman, the general manager, said that waste would be minimal because “there’s not a lot of food inventory, except for the olive oil.”
The staff was busy calling Friday night’s diners to let them know there would be no grilled white shrimp and leeks with romesco sauce; no ricotta and orange salad with black olives; and no chocolate truffle tart with Catalan cream and roasted almonds.
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