Calvin Trillin on Chez Panisse

Calvin Trillin, in the introduction to 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering, by Alice Waters:

I tend to eat in the upstairs café at Chez Panisse rather than in the more formal dining room downstairs, but I find it comforting to know that the dining room is there. Why? Because for fifteen years, beginning in the late sixties, I was in a strange town every three weeks for a series of New Yorker pieces, and my last resort for finding something decent to eat was to approach the motel clerk and say, “Not the restaurant you took your parents to on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary; the restaurant you went to the night you got home after thirteen months in Korea.” In Berkeley, I’m pleased to say, those are the same restaurant.