We decided the opening night's menu would be pâté en croute, duck with olives, and (fellow Chez Panisse cook) Lindsey's plum tart. I wanted pâté en croute because it was one of the most successful, fanciest things I'd ever served at a dinner party. A couple years before, I had made a pâté with black truffles and pistachio nuts and served it with a special wine from Paul Draper, a 1953 Calon-Segur. I'd got the recipe from Henri-Paul Pellaprat's The Great Book of French Cuisine; it was baked in a flaky pastry crust, then sliced. It was texturally great and felt elegant because it was encased in a rich, classic crust.

Making any sort of pâté takes a lot of skill, and this recipe was particularly tricky – you had to taste the mixture before it went into the pastry crust, then cook it at the right temperature so the flavours married, and you still didn't know how it was going to turn out. Luckily the one time I had made it at home, I was successful, and my reaction was just "Oh my God!" It was like making a souffle for the first time – there was magic in it. I knew Victoria (another Chez Panisse cook) had experience making pâtés, so I thought this pâté en croute would be perfect – she could cook it the day before, and all we'd have to do that night was slice it.

As for the main course, I wouldn't have thought of duck on my own – I'd never even cooked it myself before – but Victoria knew how to roast duck, and I loved that she knew. Victoria and I agonised about the right olives to use with the duck: green or black? We didn't want them to be too pungent, and the black ones were oilier and stronger. We finally decided on Sicilian green olives, both for the colour and for their mildness and ability to marry with the sauce. Lindsey's plum tart was a fait accompli – she knew how to make it, and she could make a lot of them. She had a whole dessert repertoire that we served at the restaurant for years and years. Plum tart, creme anglaise, and almond tart – those were her slam dunks.

I wanted to keep the dinner price low, though Paul (Aratow, film producer and business partner) lobbied for it to be higher. I just wanted all my friends to come, and I thought if it was too high, they wouldn't show up. We ended up deciding on $3.95 for the whole meal, which was pretty steep at the time.

By late summer 1971, it was clearly time to open – basically because we needed some money coming in. We had no test dinners; we just called our friends, told them what night to come, and opened cold.

That evening, August 28, 1971, was unusually warm, and we decided to put tables outside on the front patio so people could sit and have an aperitif before dinner. I wasn't cooking that first night – I was in the dining room; Victoria and Paul were in the kitchen, making duck with olives.

It was mayhem; some customers ate on the steps outside.

A few things I do remember vividly. It was still light outside, and the first party, a man and a woman I didn't know, were coming in the front door for their reservation. I was wearing a vintage crocheted beige lace dress from Bizarre Bazaar that fit like a glove and some little heels that matched; I remember feeling very self-conscious. Do I look OK to be answering the door? I was still tacking down the secondhand Persian carpet runner on the stairs as these people walked in. I wasn't nervous so much as obsessed – I needed everything to be done in a certain way before we opened, and the runner was part of it.

After that couple, it was practically all people we knew, a real Berkeley crowd. There was Phil Wood, a local publisher; rock critic Greil Marcus and his wife, Jenny; Danny and Hilary Goldstine, two Berkeley sex therapists; my old friend Eleanor and her date Ronnie Davis, head of the San Francisco Mime Troupe; Jacqui West, wearing a beautiful emerald green vintage Chinese dress, with her husband, Skip; a little group of letterpress printers, including Bill Buckman and Greg Robb from St. Hieronymus Press, where David worked; and, of course, David and Charles, and Claude and Martine and their baby, Camille, in her vintage wicker baby carriage; my mother and my sister Laura, who was seven months pregnant.

The whole night was out of control. I didn't have any real conversations with anyone, I was just racing to get everything to the people eating. It took a rather long time for everyone to get served; Sharon kept refilling everyone's wine glasses so they wouldn't leave. She said that from the moment she walked in to work that first night, it smelled unlike any other restaurant she'd ever been in – it smelled like magic, she said. She had been planning on helping out for only two or three weeks before starting a teaching job, but on that opening night, she knew she wanted to stay and be part of it. And thank God she did!

I needed everyone who was in the dining room that night, this motley group of people who ended up working together. They were all charismatic and were all trying their best to make people happy. That night – and every night thereafter – our job was to convince people that they were going to really, really like the food we were serving because there was only one option on the menu. And I was very good at convincing people, I was.

I have a distinct memory of looking into the kitchen and feeling so worried about getting the food out on time. Whole roasted ducks were coming out of the oven, and Victoria was smoking a cigarette as she poured off the fat and spooned the sauce over the duck. (Someone said that after that night I never stopped smelling of duck fat.) She had made a classic French sauce espagnole out of the heads, necks, and feet. I felt a deep panic as I watched: Are we going to get the duck to the table on time?

I was relieved that the pâté en croute looked as good as it did – with pickles, parsley, and a little mustard arranged on the plate – and was a cold dish, done in advance. I think everyone liked the dinner well enough, but the big hit was Lindsey's plum tart. Which, of course, we ran out of before the night was through.

It was chaos – as Victoria put it, "It was a clown show." We'd wanted the restaurant to feel like eating at home, so we'd resisted getting big industrial tools and appliances and serving equipment – all those things that make life easier that we ultimately had to figure out. We didn't have enough places to set down the dirty dishes or enough space to wash them.

We brought everything out on plates one by one instead of bringing the dishes to a bus station – we'd resisted a bus station, too – which meant many more trips in and out of the kitchen. We had a swinging door into the dining room, with a little diamond-shaped window in it, but there's a real learning curve with a swinging door – just imagine how much food dropped on the ground because we didn't know to look through the door to see who was rushing in from the other side!

The food did get to the table somehow, eventually, and people reported having a good time. But it was mayhem; some customers ate on the steps outside. Greil told me later that he arrived at nine and was pleasantly surprised that the food came promptly a few minutes later. But people at the tables around him weren't smiling. "This is the first food we've seen in two hours," they told him.

At the end of service, there was no formal celebration. It was more like: Oh my God. Half the people didn't get food in any sort of a timely way. And what are we going to serve tomorrow?

We didn't want to think about that – so as I always did after a hard day, I opened a bottle of fume blanc, and we toasted getting through the night.

Alice Waters is an American chef, restaurateur, activist and author. She is the owner of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, famous for its organic, locally grown ingredients.

Waters has been cited as one of the most influential figures in food in the past 50 years. She is one of the loudest supporters of the organic food movement, and has been a proponent of organics for more than 40 years.

Edited extract from Coming to My Senses by Alice Waters, published by Hardie Grant Books, $39.99.