Gourmet Ghetto

The neighborhood, anchored by Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, became the center of farm-to-table food sourcing, using selected locally grown produce, especially naturally and sustainably grown—preferably organic—ingredients.

Berkeley film studies professor Paul Aratow and Alice Waters, who had been a student of the French language, a political activist, and a world traveler.

The restaurant opened in an Arts and Crafts-style home on Shattuck Avenue, and featured French-style dinners but made with locally grown ingredients.

With her friends including film scholars Aratow and Tom Luddy, Waters effectively ran a culinary salon at Chez Panisse, to advocate social change with the goal of making locally sourced food economically viable.

Tower says that a turning point in the focus on locally sourced food came in October 1976, when he prepared a regional menu including cream corn soup made in a Mendocino style, oysters from Tomales Bay, cheese from Sonoma, and California-grown fruits and nuts purchased at a farmer's market in San Francisco.

The second floor cafe operated almost as a second restaurant, with an à la carte menu featuring pasta, pizza and calzone rather than the table d'hôte / prix fixe style downstairs.

In the cafe, one of the first California-style pizzas was made in a prominent wood-fired brick oven, using unusual toppings such as goat cheese and duck sausage.

[13] Though the open kitchen plan used to exhibit the preparation of food had been used in several other premium restaurants (such as Johnny Kan's in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1953, Fournou's Ovens in San Francisco in 1972, and Depuy Canal House in High Falls, New York, in 1974[14]), Chez Panisse's implementation of the concept influenced chef Wolfgang Puck, who brought it much wider acceptance beginning with his Spago restaurant in Beverly Hills.

[17] The "Gourmet Ghetto" moniker became controversial in 2019 when Nick Cho, co-owner of a new coffee shop in the neighborhood, remarked in an interview with Berkeleyside that he thought it was an inappropriate, offensive name.

The North Shattuck Association, which had been using "Gourmet Ghetto" in its marketing, deliberated and decided to drop the phrase and remove the street-side banners that used it.