Alice Waters Net Worth

What Is Alice Waters' Net Worth?

Alice Waters is an American chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, and food writer who has a net worth of $10 million. Alice Waters is best known for owning the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and it became known as an originator of the farm-to-table movement. Waters has released numerous cookbooks, including "Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook" (1982), the James Beard Award winner "Chez Panisse Vegetables" (1996), "Fanny at Chez Panisse: A Child's Restaurant Adventures with 46 Recipes" (1997), "In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart" (2010), "My Pantry: Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own: A Cookbook" (2015), and "A School Lunch Revolution: A Cookbook" (2025). Alice is the founder of the Chez Panisse Foundation, and she launched the Edible Schoolyard program at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Middle School. She also executive produced the 2014 documentary "Soul of a Banquet," and she has appeared on television shows such as "American Masters," "Somebody Feed Phil," "Top Chef," "With Love, Meghan," and "Chef's Table: Legends."

Early Life

Alice Waters was born Alice Louise Waters on April 28, 1944, in Chatham Borough, New Jersey. Her mother, Margaret, was a homemaker, and her father, Charles, graduated from Rutgers University and worked as a management consultant. Alice earned a French cultural studies degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. During her time in college, she studied abroad in France, where she "lived at the bottom of a market street." Waters has said that she "took everything in by osmosis" while studying abroad, and after bringing the French style of food preparation back to her college, she opened a Provence-style restaurant with one of her friends. As a college student, she got involved in the Free Speech Movement, and she worked on anti-Vietnam War politician Robert Scheer's congressional campaign. Alice later returned to Europe and trained at a London Montessori school. Next, she visited Turkey before spending a year in France, then she returned to Berkeley and opened Chez Panisse.

Career

In 1971, Waters opened the Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, which she named after a character she liked in a trilogy of films by Marcel Pagnol. She opened the restaurant with Paul Aratow, a comparative literature professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who later became a film producer. In 2001, Chez Panisse was named the Best Restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine, and from 2002 to 2008, Restaurant magazine included it on its list of the world's 50 best restaurants; in 2003, it was ranked #12 on the list. The restaurant was awarded a Michelin star every year from 2006 to 2009. In 2007, Restaurant magazine gave Alice a Lifetime Achievement Award and called her "one of the most influential figures in American cooking of the last 50 years." The publication also said that Waters has been described as "a visionary, a pioneer, 'the mother of American cooking' and 'the most important figure in the culinary history of North America.'" In 1980, Alice opened Chez Panisse Café upstairs, and four years later, she opened Café Fanny, which she named after her daughter. Café Fanny closed in 2012. Waters released her first cookbook, "Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook," in 1982, and she followed it with "Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza, Calzone" in 1986, "Chez Panisse Desserts: A Cookbook" in 1994, "Chez Panisse Vegetables" in 1996, "Fanny at Chez Panisse: A Child's Restaurant Adventures with 46 Recipes" in 1997, and "Chez Panisse Café Cookbook" in 1999. In the 2000s, she has published books such as "Chez Panisse Fruit" (2002), "The Art of Simple Food" (2007), "In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart" (2010), "My Pantry: Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own: A Cookbook" (2015), "We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto" (2021), and "A School Lunch Revolution: A Cookbook" (2025).

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Activism

In 1996, Alice established the Chez Panisse Foundation, which was later renamed the Edible Schoolyard Project. The organization is "dedicated to the transformation of public education by using organic school gardens, kitchens, and cafeterias to teach both academic subjects and the values of nourishment, stewardship, and community." The Edible Schoolyard program began at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley and led to the School Lunch Initiative, which encourages students to eat a fresh, sustainable meal during the school day. During a 2009 appearance on "60 Minutes," Waters publicly called for the Obama administration to add an organic garden to the White House grounds. First Lady Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden later that year as part of her Let's Move! anti-obesity campaign. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Obama's Let's Move campaign, which replaced her predecessor's literacy drive, addresses much of what Waters has been preaching … Chris Lehane, a political consultant who has worked for Al Gore and Bill Clinton, sees Waters as 'the George Washington of the movement and Northern California as the 13 colonies … If you're going to pick a figure who's responsible for it all, it all comes back to her.'"

Awards and Honors

Waters has won six James Beard Foundation Awards: Best Chef (1992), Outstanding Restaurant for Chez Panisse (1992), an award in the Fruits & Vegetables category for the cookbook "Chez Panisse Vegetables" (1997), a Humanitarian of the Year award (1997), a Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), and a Leadership Award (2011). She has also received Lifetime Achievement Awards from Bon Appétit (2002) and The World's 50 Best Restaurants list (2007). Gourmet magazine named Chez Panisse the Best Restaurant in America in 2001, and in 2010, The Observer included "Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook" on its "50 Best Cookbooks of All Time" list.

For her advocacy, Alice has been honored with the National Audubon Society's Rachel Carson Award (2004), the Global Environmental Citizen Award (2008), and the National Humanities Medal (2014). She has been inducted into the California Hall of Fame (2008), New Jersey Hall of Fame (2014), American Academy of Arts and Letters (2014), and National Women's Hall of Fame (2017), and she has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007) and American Philosophical Society (2014). Waters received the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award in 1998, and she was made a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council in 2008. She received an honorary Doctorate of Humanities from Princeton University in 2009 and an honorary degree from the American University of Rome in 2015. In 2009, Alice received France's highest honor, the French Legion of Honor. In 2014, Time magazine named her one of the year's most influential people.

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