Chez Panisse

Alice Waters's Berkeley restaurant is the origin point of California cuisine — the place where the farm-to-table movement was effectively born in 1971 and has continued, course by course, every night since. The upstairs café is more casual and à la carte; the downstairs dining room runs a single prix-fixe menu that changes daily based on what arrived from the farms that morning. The wood-shingled craftsman building is warm and unpretentious. A pilgrimage meal — not because it's the most ambitious cooking in the Bay Area, but because it's the most influential.