Most overrated I have ever eaten in is Chez Panisse, the temple of California cuisine in Berkeley.

Actually, Chez Panisse consists of two establishments. Upstairs is the Chez Panisse Cafe, with simple fare such as pizzettas and salad.

Downstairs, is the restaurant proper, which only has one prix-fixe menu per night, and which changes every day.

Of course, the founder of Chez Panisse is the legendary Alice Waters, who is credited with creating the California cuisine movement, a movement which eventually changed the way Americans eat.

In this respect, I think it is safe to say that Waters is a seminal figure in the history of American food, perhaps more so even than Julia Childs.

The problem, though, is that the restaurant and cafe, while both highly rated, have always been very, shall we say, basic.

Of course, Chez Panisse has legions of unconditional fans, but almost all will also acknowledge that the food is very basic, bland, and simple.

Ultimately, Chez Panisse is a shrine, where patrons go to pay homage to Alice Waters.

As a restaurant it is nothing special. The Cafe has basic pizzettas, perhaps slightly a cut above your basic California Pizza Kitchen.

In the restaurant, the menu changes every night, and one must usually reserve weeks or months in advance, without knowing what the offerings on that night will be. There are no substitutions or choices allowed. Also, the cost of the prix fixe varies substantially between (these days) $60 and close to $100 per person without wine.

It has often been said that the best dish at Chez Panisse is the salad, and I would tend to agree. After all, Alice Waters, who was a French cultural studies major at UC Berkeley, is mainly credited with originating the notion of using fresh, local ingredients.

I have eaten at the cafe and the restaurant a number of times and I have never felt I had a good meal at either. Food is always bland and quite flavorless. The meats I have had there have often been tough and stringy.

The service can best be described as "Berkeley aloof," not especially professional and oh so aloof.

In my opinion, Chez Panisse is not a restaurant in the classic definition of the term, but instead essentially a grocery store that also prepares food. The ingredients are fresh, wonderful, but like any grocery store, they don't do an especially good job of preparing the food.

I have had better, far more inventive food in dozens of restaurants, including in unlikely places such as the exquisite American Restaurant in Kansas City's Crown Center, where chef Debbie Gold does all the things with local ingredients that Alice Waters' team ought to.

Ultimately, any criticism of Chez Panisse is met with a torrent of contempt, as an unforgivable heresy against the temple of California cuisine and its high priestess, Alice Waters.

Actually, as an homage, or an experience, Chez Panisse is fine, in the same vein as going to Tavern on the Green or Le Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower, for the experience.

But as a restaurant, it is horrendously overrrated.