I moved to California in 1993, with a cello in tow and five summers of restaurant work under my belt. I was 21 years old, living with two college friends in a small one-bedroom apartment on Derby and Telegraph, and I landed a job bussing tables and stocking wine at Chez Panisse. I did not know the restaurant’s revolutionary reputation; my world was still so very small, and I was simply happy to have a job.

My coworkers at Chez Panisse were characters from all walks of life, ranging in age from sixteen to sixty, and from every corner of the world. The one thing they seemed to have in common was a love of fresh food, and a dedication to meticulous yet unfussy service. There were bussers from Berkeley High School, and from Iran, line cooks from Walnut Creek, and Italy, French waiters, and an Austrian floor manager, and they mostly all got on pretty well together. After just a few years, I felt like I’d been adopted by an enormous and colorful international family.

The best part of the wine stocking job was lunch. The leftovers from the previous day’s menus were reworked by the garde manger and laid out on the picnic table, and the office workers, reservationists, cooks and myself would sit and indulge in crab with celery root remoulade, or blood orange and fennel salad, or duck leg confit, and never without a fruit tart or chocolate pudding to finish.

I recall one lunch in particular, though not for the food, rather as an eye-opening experience. I was sitting with Dondhup, Khalil, and Raul, and they were telling stories of how they ended up in the US. Dondhup, along with several others at the restaurant, had arrived in Berkeley just a few years earlier, when visas became available to Tibetans living in India and Nepal. Khalil and his son Yosef had fled their Afghan home and trekked through mountains with only what they could carry before coming to California. And then there was Raoul: “The first time we tried to row from Cuba to Florida, they caught us and put us in jail,” he explained. “Then I started lifting weights, and the next time, we made it.”

Thank you, Chez Panisse, for the delicious lunches, and for expanding my mind by welcoming so many refugees into the family. At that picnic table, I began to understand that the strength and richness of our society is inextricably bound up in our diversity, and we must continue to value and embrace the other. Let us march on and raise our voices to this effect.

Missing you,

Max