Quick answer
Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto is the North Shattuck district that became the birthplace of California cuisine. Chez Panisse opened here in 1971 under Alice Waters, Alfred Peet started specialty coffee at the corner of Walnut and Vine in 1966, and the Cheese Board Collective introduced the sourdough baguette to the United States in 1975.
Full transcript
The Block That Changed What Americans Eat
North Berkeley's Shattuck Avenue, roughly between Rose and Delaware, reads like an ordinary shopping street. Then the dates start: in 1966 Alfred Peet opened the first Peet's Coffee at the corner of Walnut and Vine, and specialty coffee in America began there. In 1971 Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse a few doors down, in a converted house, cooking French-style dinners from ingredients bought from local growers. By the late nineteen seventies the street had a name: the Gourmet Ghetto, coined by the comedian Darryl Henriques and spread by the journalist Alice Kahn.
The Rises on the Same Blocks
The same two blocks kept producing. The Cheese Board, a cheese shop founded in 1967, became an employee-owned collective in 1971 and introduced the sourdough baguette to the United States in 1975. In 1973 Alice Medrich began selling chocolate truffles out of a nearby charcuterie, and a few years later she opened Cocolat on the same block — the start of the American truffle craze. In 1976 the Chez Panisse kitchen served a Northern California regional dinner, built entirely from Bay Area farms, that is often credited as the birth of California cuisine. In 1980 the restaurant added an upstairs cafe built around an open kitchen, a design that would help popularize the style across the country.
What to Do
Walk the two blocks and you are walking the history of American food: the corner where Peet's started in 1966, the Cheese Board Collective where the sourdough baguette landed in 1975, and the plain wooden house on Shattuck that still reads Chez Panisse. None of it is a museum; all of it still works, and queues form at all three. Buy a baguette at the Cheese Board, take a coffee at the original corner, and stand outside Chez Panisse — the kitchen inside still cooks from whatever the farmers brought that morning.