Foreword

I met Jody Williams in the clean, yet dingy and crowded, back of house of the Four Seasons Clift Hotel in San Francisco in 1988. Jody was a banquet porter, decked out in a clean, white lab coat and jeans, and I was a grimy sous-chef in a dishwasher shirt and bib apron. Outside the impressive walls of the 5-star, 5-diamond hotel on Geary and Taylor, was the salty section of the City by the Bay known as the Tenderloin.

There was a revolution going on in San Francisco and Berkeley. “Foodies” had not yet self-monikered, but food had become a thing, and restaurants had become more than a place to eat. They were theatrical settings where politicians and artists and titans of society and industry met to see and be seen, to taste the latest creations of the newly lauded chefs, all decked out in haberdashery and starched chef coats. These chefs were the new heroes—their names: Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Mark Miller, and Wolfgang Puck, among others—and their sparkling creativity collided with the old guard to breed a new kind of restaurant where deliciousness, whimsy, and fun could play together in the previously serious and hallowed halls of fine dining.

Jody and I were hustling greasy shimmering hot boxes filled with banquet plates of Continental food and Queen Mary racks of dirty dishes between elegantly appointed dining rooms and the fluorescent-lit dishwasher room in the unpolished hallways never seen by our wealthy customer base. We would plate banquets for twenty or one hundred people off the sweaty and steamy back line of the kitchen, to be served to the uber-rich, fêting those who would eventually become the Silicon Valley robber barons.

Much has changed.

After meeting and drifting away as coworkers, Jody and I separately went to Italy to travel and cook in small kitchens. We both knew that the truth and the core (as well as the frippery and the pomp) of the California Cuisine revolution was based on the flavors and traditions of Italian and French gastronomy, and each of us had gone on our own journeys to find a piece of that story. Oddly, while I was working in a tiny hill town south of Bologna, I heard about a young American chef working in Reggio Emilia, the swank little town up the Via Emilia, and it turned out to be Jody. We bonded again, loving life in the Emilian Apennines, and then moved on to our new and different paths.

Years later, in New York City, we found each other again when Jody, in cahoots with my at-that-time new friends Joe and Lidia Bastianich, opened a Friulian frasca in the theater district called Frico Bar. She worked there and developed some other great restaurants, but I was most excited by Jody pulling the rabbit out of the hat with Buvette, where she and her staff share the love and joy of quality ingredients and dispense wine and coffee and amazing food with a passionate understanding of its unfettered excellence.

West Village locals immediately flocked, and foodies from all over began the pilgrimage to soak up the dreamy simplicity and idiosyncratic design Zen of Jody’s quirky and erudite vision, this time through the spectrum of French food and wine.

Needless to say, Jody has achieved a quiet hero status in the New York City gastronomic clique. And while Martha and Alice and Muhlke and the entire pantheon of food aristocracy quietly slide into Buvette daily, there is a certain restraint in the press, as if we are preserving the secret of Buvette’s pleasure for an inner circle.

To say that I love Jody and her food and everything about her is understatement, and it is with sweet joy that I see her emerge from the secret circles of foodies into the bright light for all to discover with this magnificent tome. This cookbook, Buvette, captures Jody’s pure unadulterated genius. Its supremely poetic design is perceived as simple, but, upon closer inspection, is rich and complex. The elegant and dreamy deliciousness of the food she creates—understated and nearly literary in its scope—will drive you crazy (in a good way!). The recipes are simple, easy to follow, and carry Jody’s well-observed travels and her own remarkable personal story within them. From the seeds of the food revolution in California in the ’80s all the way to the fruits of that movement in 2014, Jody and her food have been evolving, and more and more people come to sit at her table. With the release of Buvette, the cookbook, the whole country can partake as she takes center stage. Enjoy!

—Mario Batali