The gossip in gastronomic circles last week centered on a half-baked hatchet job [1] on Alice Waters that ran in the New York Times Style magazine recently.

The premise of San Francisco chef Dan Patterson’s piece – that Water’s influence has created some kind of Tyranny of the Simple and Seasonal that’s stifling culinary creativity among Bay Area chefs – generated plenty of buzz along with a rebuttal [2] or two [3], of sorts, from the blogosphere.

A birthday party I went to last Saturday was full of professional foodies: chefs, food writers, and Chez Panisse [4]’s own “meat forager,” who shared a sample of a still-under-development hot dog made from grass-fed cows that graze on the hills of Hearst Castle. The consensus of this crowd: (a) superb hot dog, and (b) hell hath no fury like a chef scorned.

Patterson may still be smarting from his terminated tenure at Frisson, [5] a trendy San Francisco restaurant where he apparently failed to set the world on fire with his coriander scented duck breast with escarole and huckleberry-olive emulsion.

He rails about a “fake-populist aversion to fancy food.” But what if the revolt is real?

Yes, Alice Waters changed the way we think about food and how we eat, with her gospel of locally grown [5], seasonal produce and the revival of mealtimes as a pleasurable ritual. But is it really fair to scapegoat her if patrons express a preference for simpler fare over entrees that try too hard and cost too much?

Maybe Patterson’s been breathing the rarified air of the food snob stratosphere for too long; a lot of people who love good food don’t give a hoot about haute cuisine. It might be as simple as that.