By Virginie Boone

Netflix is airing a four-part series called “Chef’s Table Legends” right now, a spin-off of its Emmy Award-winning “Chef’s Table” series which debuted 10 years ago. A celebration of that milestone, each episode of “Legends,” of which there are only four, focuses on one culinary superstar – Jamie Oliver, Thomas Keller, Jose Andres and Alice Waters – and how they have impacted the food world.

They are all globally recognized names with global impact, but the Alice Waters episode in particular struck close to home.

Waters of course is the founder of renowned restaurant Chez Panisse, which she opened in Berkeley in 1971. She is not only a restaurateur, but chef, cookbook author and memoirist. She has also earned many James Beard Awards, including for Humanitarian of the Year (1997) and Lifetime Achievement (2004). Many credit her with helping to create the farm-to-table movement in America and the concept of California cuisine.

Indeed, “Chef’s Table Legends” calls her “the mother of the farm-to-table movement,” while one of Waters’ most moving parting statements during the show is, “A place where we treasure our farmers, that’s the world I want to live in.”

Since day one of Chez Panisse, and still today, many of those farms in Waters’s farm-to-table concept, and the farmers that she treasures, are in Sonoma County.

One that gets specifically mentioned by Netflix is Seven Moons Farms, a collaboration between Rebecca Bozzelli, Kate Cherry, Ross Cannard and Nick Rupiper, all lifetime friends who have been farming as Seven Moons for only a short time. Seven Moons specializes in growing high-quality fruit and vegetables for restaurants and farmers markets, avocados and citrus in particular.

But also asparagus, leeks, radishes, spinach, green garlic, limes, navel oranges, blood oranges… the list goes on. The farm is set along the eastern side of Sonoma’s Valley of the Moon and was once known as Cannard Farms. Footage of the farm shows flowering Spigarello (an heirloom broccoli), and lettuce being harvested.

Seven Moons is following in the footsteps of original farmer (and Ross’s dad) Bob Cannard, the one Chez Panisse turned to in its earliest days – Waters has said she “found taste” when she met Bob Cannard, calling him one of her heroes.

In addition to Cannard Farms, Bob was later the founder of Green String Farm off Old Adobe and Frates roads in Petaluma, a 140-acre organic/regenerative high-quality produce farm he founded in 2003 with Fred Cline of Cline Cellars.

Green String closed in 2022 after Bob decided to relocate to Chico and do his own thing, “an indefinite pause,” as he put it on his Facebook page.

Cannard was also a longtime lecturer at Santa Rosa Junior College. In fact it was his father, Robert H. Cannard, who helped create and develop the agricultural department at the JC.

So when Waters needed a farmer, Cannard Farms was there, becoming so well-known that when juice company Odwalla started looking to grow carrots for its popular carrot juice, it came to Cannard, a “poster boy for ‘90s micro-farming,” who was a mix of “Jeff Bridges by way of Elmer Gentry,” as a profile in Metro Silicon Valley once described.

There are also several interview transcripts with Cannard in the UC Davis Library Digital Collection.

In one, he says that he started his vegetable farming career selling at farmers markets exclusively in Sonoma County, but “Chez [Panisse] came around and asked if I’d be interested in working with them and I recognized that they especially, but the restaurant crowd in general got lots better coverage [than farms] and Alice especially who was very keen on the promotion of what we were trying to do and freshness and closeness of the farm, localness.”

Cannard grew up in Kenwood, helping to run his family’s nursery. He later founded retail nursery Sonoma Mission Gardens, also on Valley of the Moon’s eastern edges.

Chez Panisse still lists farms and ranches by name on its menu and carries Sonoma County wines from the likes of Peay, Ridge, Hirsch, Cruse, A. Rafanelli, Arnot-Roberts and others, continuing its dedication to sourcing local – if you’ve never been, it’s worth every penny.

An aside – Alice Waters’ former partner Stephen Singer, with whom she raised daughter, Fanny Singer, is proprietor of Baker Lane Vineyards in Sebastopol, a producer of fine, cool-climate Syrah and Viognier.

You can also glory in one of Chez Panisse’s featured farms here at home. Find Seven Moons at the Sonoma Valley Farmers Market on Fridays 9 am to 12:30 pm and Saturdays 8:30 am to 1 pm at the Santa Rosa Farmers Market at Luther Burbank Center.