Coming to My Senses

“Longing for a heart to heart with the woman who changed the way America eats? This is your chance. Alice has written a book so intimate that, although I’ve known her most of my life, I feel I’ve finally gotten to know her.”
—Ruth Reichl 

“Waters describes these discoveries with the intense specificity we all give our life-changing first encounters in Coming to My Senses, a partial autobiography that ends on the night in 1971 when she opened Chez Panisse . . . The book is a prequel, the story before the story everybody knows.”
—Pete Wells, New York Times

“Ms. Waters is the reason restaurants started naming farms on menus and serving mesclun salads and American-made goat cheese.”
—Kim Severson, New York Times

“One of the architects of California cuisine, Alice Waters reveals her rise to Chez Panisse fame in her latest memoir. Waters has never been shy about telling her story, but this book goes further back than most of her earlier work.”
—Eater

“You’ll get lost in [Waters’s] palpable passion, all the while learning about her love for rosé, her genius way to make mayo and that time she turned down a dinner with John Lennon.”
—Tasting Table

“[Waters] does an artful job of showing how even the most apparently unrelated experiences helped lead her to her profession. She is also quite frank about her failures; her relationships with lovers, friends, and colleagues; and her pride in remaining a part of the 1960s counterculture that nourished her. An almost charmed restaurant life that exhales the sweet aromas of honesty and self-awareness.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“After reading this mouthwatering tale of Waters’ intrepid youth, you’ll be hungry for more.”
—USA Today

“Through Chez Panisse, her decades of writing, advocacy and yes, dreaming, Waters has helped change how Americans eat for the better through the culinary expression of her counterculture convictions.”
—Bill Daley, Chicago Tribune

“Readers will be charmed by Waters’s adoration of exquisitely prepared food. Her anecdotes and her descriptions of friends and customers (many of whom were filmmakers, artists, and prominent thinkers of the time) bring the era and the restaurant to the mind’s eye in vibrant detail.”
—Publishers Weekly 


Notable Press & Accolades:

New York Times bestseller in Hardcover Nonfiction

Publishers Weekly bestseller in Hardcover Nonfiction

Los Angeles Times bestseller in Hardcover Nonfiction

IndieBound bestseller in Hardcover Nonfiction

Amazon Best of the Year 2017, Top 100 

Amazon Best of the Year 2017, Category Picks, Biography & Memoirs

Amazon Best of the Year 2017, Category Picks, Cookbook, Food, & Wine

Amazon Best of the Year 2017, Holiday Gift Picks, True Stories, Well Told

The Best Books Written About Food in 2017—The Independent

Fall 2017 Most Anticipated Books—Publishers Weekly

Ten Cookbooks for Fall—USA Today

What to Read This Month—Vanity Fair

50 New Books to Read in Fall 2017—PureWow