The state California is blessed with abundant sunshine, fertile soil, and enthusiastic entrepreneurs who feed a good portion of North Americans with their produce and fruits.

Up to 1970’s the population ate regular non-descript American everyday food, heavy on meat, processed food, and refined carbohydrates. Then came Alice Waters who correctly recognized the bounty of the state, and by a laudable example in her restaurant (Chez Panisse) popularized a cuisine based on fresh, seasonal produce prepared and presented wit flair. Her culinary background is solid and French Provencal, which she successfully translated to California.

Enter Wolfgang Puck, a transplanted Austrian chef, and California cuisine becomes fashionable with the rich and famous. He literally catered to the actors, actresses, and movie moguls, who in turn made his food fashionable.

California cuisine as invented by Alice Waters advocates seasonality and freshness. There is nothing startling about this concept. Only one thing is remarkable, and that is fusing two or more cuisines. Like most of America, everything is taken from everywhere and put together in a new and appealing fashion on a large scale.

Essentially then, California cuisine is based on fusing culinary ideas from a variety of sources using fresh local foods enhanced by exotic hers and spices. Some of the recipes are inspiring, others may be considered over the top, like pizza with all common ingredients and pineapples, or with chucks of lobster tail!
Many California restaurant settings are spectacular, and people enjoy the environment, may be more than the food.

To sit in a garden patio setting, dining on butter-soft abalone, and a choice of 200 or more wines at your fingertips, is to understand that life gets no better, especially when the abalone, the baby lettuces, heirloom tomatoes in your salad, and the chardonnay or riesling grapes that yielded your wine, were grown down the road.

Inspired cuisine, aptly named California cuisine, is constant only in that it is continually reinventing itself. American consumers have a short attention span when it comes to food. They want new foods and combinations every few years and aspiring chefs deliver.

Infuse a state that produces a bounty of fresh fruits, vegetables, cheeses, seafood, and meats, with a rainbow of 200 plus languages and nationalities and you get pretty much every gastronomic fusion imaginable.

You can experience California cuisine by sampling from a roadside shack taco filled with seafood, or at Alice Waters Chez Panisse restaurant or French Laundry established by one of the chefs who worked for her.
It is an adventure and pleasantly revealing gastronomic experience to travel in California.

Guest Writer – Hrayr Berberoglu E-mail or interested in his books?.

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Tags: California, Cuisine

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 06:00 and is filed under Food & Wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.