MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleWaters dictated the stories in the book to two friends, Cristina Mueller and Bob Carrau, and the prose feels like it. It’s an approach that might work for a cookbook of 100 recipes that is essentially a series of moments. But a 300-page autobiography is a different beast. The book is at its best, especially for a restaurant geek like me, when exploring the crucible that created Chez Panisse, namely the counterculture movement of Berkeley in the early 1970s. Reading about the first dinner service at Chez Panisse (lovingly described by Waters’ friend as a 'clown show') is a thrill ... the book is more about its surrounding community than the chef, almost as if Waters is a boat, passively whisked away on a roaring river of the revolutionary Berkeley. I found myself wishing that Coming to My Senses delved more deeply into the author herself and the larger themes that made her one of the most influential people of her era.
