After fifty years of existence, the "Gourmet Ghetto", the "Gourmet ghetto" in Berkeley is no more. The term meant the northern triangle of the capital of the sixties counterculture, across the bay from San Francisco, California.
Berkeley, its multinobélisée university and its famous restaurants, among which Chez Panisse, opened in 1971 by Alice Waters, the popess of Californian cuisine, of the movement farm-to-table ("From farm to table") and the good taste of fresh produce.
It was enough for Nick Cho, the founder of the high-end cafes Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, to settle in the neighborhood and judge the expression "Racially connoted" to convince Alice Waters, the other restaurateurs and the chamber of commerce. The qualifier is being removed from posters and guided tours.
Joyful and unfussy
Well in her time, Samin Nosrat fully agrees with Alice Waters, with whom she studied. "Our choice of vocabulary matters, she says. It’s a real change from an inclusion perspective. " At 40, this Iranian-born American is the chief who goes up to Berkeley – and to the United States. She doesn't have a restaurant, but has been evangelizing on Netflix for just over a year. The documentary series in which she is the joyful and unfussy star is named after her bestseller published in 2017, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, published in France mid-November under the title Salt, fat, acid, heat (Editions du Chêne).
His bias: to describe the interactions between the elements. The kitchen is "At the crossroads of art and chemistry", she wrote. The manual does not detail recipes – they are returned in the appendix – but tells the components in all their states and sometimes their poetry. A new way of seeing, thinking and telling about cooking. With it, eating becomes again a love story, not a calorie calculation or a photo plan on Instagram.
Official trailer of Salt Fat Acid Heat on Netflix
We find Samin Nosrat at her home in Oakland one sunny morning. The chef – who is also one of the five food critics of the New York Times Magazine – just bought a house in the bohemian neighborhood of Rockridge, on the edge of Berkeley, where it's still five degrees higher than on the other side of the East Bay Bridge. The pavilion is located a few minutes from the metro, but it feels like arriving on a farm. A vegetable garden surrounded by a white fence, a smell of lilac, a fig tree, an orange tree.
