Coming to senses : The Making of a Counterculture Cook

Despite having read about Alice Waters for years, I only managed to eat at her famous Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, just once:  for lunch in the cafe on May 21,1983, when she may well have no longer been working in the kitchen. (With no reservations, we waited for two hours for a table.) Her career as chef was fairly short-lived, but those of restaurateur, cookbook author, and food activist, are ongoing.  Coming to My Senses is about a young person finding her way in a world where sex and politics, and the role of women was a spin of the roulette wheel. Waters takes us up to the opening of her restaurant in 1971, and not much beyond. Readers will want to compare this to Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me With Apples and Tender at the Bone. Waters is too modest to belong in the pantheon of great memoir writers--this is more a perfect peach fondly remembered than an elaborate tasting menu-- but her place in the pantheon of great Americans is assured.