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"FacebookPinterest\n\nNew York hasn&amp;#39;t had much of a century, once you get past David Chang. These days, ambition among promising chefs is defined as campaigning to get on Top Chef. Our new restaurants seem to specialize in big-butt Italian cooking, big-bucks burgers, white-trash southern cooking, non-pizzaiolo pizza, pig parts, and formulaic empire-building. Let me tell you how desperate things have gotten: Chefs are coming down from Montreal to teach us New Yorkers how to eat, and they&amp;#39;re doing a good job of it.\n\nIt&amp;#39;s not utterly hopeless. Paul Liebrandt (molecular gastronomy), April Bloomfield (haute British pub food), and C\u00E9sar Ramirez (classy Brooklyn counter food) are notable chefs of these times. So is Daniel Humm, who cooks French, but he came here after making his mark in San Francisco. That fact would have surprised me a few years back, but it doesn&amp;#39;t anymore, not after I figured out what was happening out there. At each moment in history, there&amp;#39;s a city or region that chefs have to visit to learn what&amp;#39;s going on in American cooking. Usually it&amp;#39;s New York, but I&amp;#39;ve known it to be Chicago, southern Florida, Texas, and Los Angeles. Right now it&amp;#39;s San Francisco, where restaurants of ambition and imagination are opening. Something else is happening: A brand-new Northern California regional cuisine is coming to life.\n\nI used to think that San Francisco never did anything better than New York where restaurants were concerned. It&amp;#39;s not that you couldn&amp;#39;t get a passable meal there, assuming you were satisfied with a respectable head of lettuce, a loaf of almost fresh sourdough bread, and a booming bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. For that matter, I&amp;#39;m addicted to those little cups of shredded Dungeness crab sold at Fisherman&amp;#39;s Wharf, although the crab is tasteless and has been for forty years.\n\nIn the &amp;#39;70s, when I was a sportswriter, I would drive to Oakland to get barbecue at Flint&amp;#39;s, because mops were used to soak the meats with sauce, and I was pretty sure that made it authentic. Flint&amp;#39;s is closed now, its windows taped up, a thick metal grate barring the door. Actually, the grate was always there, Oakland being that sort of city back then. I didn&amp;#39;t think much of the restaurants of the dot-com era, because they specialized in serving overpriced fusion cuisine to people with more money than I had, and I got the impression that if you didn&amp;#39;t have dot-com money, the chefs would prefer you stayed away. Michael Mina had a moment of brilliance at San Francisco&amp;#39;s Aqua, but he went the way of franchising, and that was that. The Slanted Door, now in the Ferry Building, is pretty wonderful, but it&amp;#39;s not authentic Vietnamese food, and I&amp;#39;m willing to contribute to the praise as long as nobody pretends it is.\n\nThe new restaurants I&amp;#39;ve been noticing are being opened by young chefs throughout the Bay Area, which takes in downtown San Francisco, rejuvenated Oakland, the still-rough-edged Mission District, and the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, in Sausalito. David Kinch, 50, a chef in the obscure city of Los Gatos who is seen as the father of this emerging movement, thinks these chefs, all in their twenties and thirties, are boldly setting forth because they haven&amp;#39;t suffered setbacks and have no difficulty finding the courage to gamble. He recently read a story where freshmen and sophomore high school students didn&amp;#39;t understand the fuss over the death of Osama bin Laden because they were too young to remember the horror of the 2001 attack. &amp;quot;Maybe these chefs never felt the pain of the recession. They simply think that this is their time,&amp;quot; he says.\n\nWhen I walked into Mission Chinese Food, located in San Francisco&amp;#39;s Mission District, the cooks were enjoying staff lunch in a back room, sitting on plastic tubs that once held soy sauce and dishwasher detergent. A bicycle hung from a hook over a decrepit staircase. A few bags of onions were stored in places vegetables didn&amp;#39;t belong. Mission Chinese Food may be the first permanent pop-up restaurant in America, operating within the confines of another Chinese restaurant, Lung Shan. If you wonder about the existence of parallel universes, you&amp;#39;ll find one here.\n\nI&amp;#39;m used to two kinds of Chinese food: the elite version that features banquet dishes plus condescending service, and the basic version where the ingredients are low-cost and the service absent. At Mission Chinese, the products are first-rate and the waitstaff low-key. The chef and co-founder, Danny Bowien, found his cooks through advertisements in a Chinese newspaper. &amp;quot;The 26-year-old guy had recently moved here from China,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;He was a truck driver. The 55-year-old guy had always lived here. He was in the music business. We could have hired real cooks, but they wouldn&amp;#39;t have stayed long. We could have hired real Chinese chefs, but they&amp;#39;d say we were doing everything wrong.&amp;quot;\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nHis critique of his own skills as head chef: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know how to make Chinese food.&amp;quot;\n\nBowien was born in Korea, adopted at 3 months, and raised in Oklahoma, where, he insists, all Chinese restaurants have pink tablecloths and specialize in sweet-and-sour chicken. Mission Chinese Food is decorated with fake flowers, Chinese Communist propaganda pictures, and a paper dragon snaking across the ceiling. It seats about sixty and has lines nightly, with the tables turning over five or six times. Bowien also has a small crew delivering food. One is the son of the owner of Lung Shan, who belongs to a car club and made deliveries in a very fast Honda CR-X until he totaled it.\n\nThe output of the kitchen is staggering, especially considering the equipment in use: &amp;quot;We have four burners and one shitty oven that doesn&amp;#39;t work,&amp;quot; Bowien says. The menu lists twenty-six items, counting his slow-cooked non-Chinese barbecue\u2014beef brisket, pork trotters, and lamb cheeks. Nothing on the menu is priced at more than $12.50, and seventy-five cents is donated to the San Francisco Food Bank for every entr\u00E9e sold.\n\nThe corned beef in his celebrated kung pao corned beef, made on premises, tastes like New York smoked pastrami. Greaseless, fluffy salt-cod fried rice, an homage to the Chinese love of salted fish, and Westlake Rice Porridge, thick with chunks of fresh Dungeness crab and flavored with oxtail and cilantro, got me infatuated with two dishes that hadn&amp;#39;t interested me before. The dish called thrice-cooked bacon is made with $7-per-pound Tennessee bacon and is accompanied by a tale of vindication. His agreement with the owners of Lung Shan calls for them to pay all food costs for the restaurant, and, Bowien says, &amp;quot;We were having crazy fights at the beginning, because we use Creekstone Farms meat, and they said that the Benton&amp;#39;s bacon was seven times as much as what they were paying. The turning point arrived when we found ourselves running short of bacon, it was going too fast, and we discovered that their family and chefs were eating immense amounts of our food, it was so much better than what they usually had for themselves.&amp;quot;\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nThe emergence of these new San Francisco restaurants marks an end to the influence of old-style California cuisine, which blossomed in the &amp;#39;70s. There really were two versions. The first, in the south, was characterized by Wolfgang Puck&amp;#39;s sweet, colorful, creamy, and spicy food, as well as his haute pizza. The second, in the north, was defined by Alice Waters and her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971 with an irresistibly simple message: fresh food. Amazingly, nobody had thought of it before. It swept away other trends, other food philosophies. Suddenly, filet mignon with a baked potato was no longer the standard for fine dining in America.\n\nWhat Puck, Waters, and all the other old-Calfornia-cuisine chefs espoused was informality, accompanied by modest forays into the spices and flavors of foreign cuisines. These were usually Mediterranean, although Puck would later open his wildly successful Chinois. Waters and Chez Panisse back then seemed only a part of what was a widespread movement, but they have remained the enduring symbols of all that was California cuisine. I remember only one other Northern California food-preparation trend that thrived after her ascendancy: grilling meats and vegetables using vine cuttings as fuel. Napa Valley chefs marveled at the differences that Pinot Noir and Cabernet imparted, not that there were any.\n\nSuddenly and shockingly, the fundamental tenets of Waters are under assault. She is perceived as puritanical and minimalist, while the young chefs see their food as sensual and themselves as maximalists. I suspect they began to resent being lower on the celebrity food chain than the local, organic, and sustainable vegetables and meats that Waters celebrated and they still buy. Says Thomas McNaughton, chef of Flour + Water restaurant, &amp;quot;For so long the school of thought has been &amp;#39;Here is a beautiful turnip; why do anything to change it?&amp;#39; Now we are saying, &amp;#39;Here is a beautiful turnip with layers of flavor. I can develop it in different ways.&amp;#39; &amp;quot; Adds Teague Moriarty, co-chef of Sons Daughters restaurant, &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s an Alice Waters backlash.&amp;quot;\n\nChefs do not want the head of Waters, but they do want her throne, and they want an end to the worship of simplicity. &amp;quot;The church of the philosophy of Alice Waters had a lot of followers, but nobody went outside the box,&amp;quot; says McNaughton. They&amp;#39;re beating up on her beloved farms, too. They dislike having to spell out on menus where products were grown or raised, or in the case of seafood, the boat it rode in on. They no longer wish to train their staffs to discuss agriculture or animal husbandry. &amp;quot;It had gotten so that everybody who came to eat in a restaurant had to know where the chicken was from. They had a sense of entitlement to that information,&amp;quot; says Bowien. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#39;t think you should spend thirty minutes of your meal talking about your food. We&amp;#39;re not saving lives here. We&amp;#39;re not paramedics.&amp;quot;\n\nThe chefs have a new champion, Kinch. He has his own garden and sources elite products for his restaurant, Manresa. To add to the mystique, he works out of an odd little hidden mall (you try to find it) in Los Gatos, in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. There he cooks elegantly, with impeccable technique and the sense of place that is so important to Californians. His food is startling, local, Eurocentric, and revered. McNaughton refers to him as &amp;quot;a tortured artist,&amp;quot; while Jason Fox of the restaurant Commonwealth adds, &amp;quot;It all starts with David Kinch. I worship at the temple of David Kinch.&amp;quot;\n\nExplains Kinch, &amp;quot;What I try to do in my restaurant is contribute to the conversation of what California cuisine did, add to what Alice, Jeremiah Tower, and Wolfgang Puck started thirty or forty years ago. Five years ago, chefs were still copying Alice, afraid to break out of her shadow, still grilling pork chops. They were familiar with vegetables but didn&amp;#39;t know what to do with them. We&amp;#39;re all indebted to Alice. Her message was ingredients and simplicity, and everybody did it to a fault. All that is changing, and you have to remember that it started to happen in a fearful time, the worst downturn in fifty or sixty years. What I am seeing is California cuisine coming into the twenty-first century. Ambition has been in remission the last couple of years. Not now. These kids are doing it.&amp;quot;\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nMission Chinese isn&amp;#39;t necessarily the best of the new restaurants, merely the most fun. All are different, linked by one abiding culinary principle: individuality. Plate Shop is the restaurant in Sausalito, a once lovely but now one-dimensional tourist destination. Getting there from San Francisco means crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, which is only a joy if you&amp;#39;re humming Tony Bennett songs and seeking objets d&amp;#39;art. Says Kim Alter, the recently departed chef, &amp;quot;Most people who live out here want to go into the city to eat, and people in the city don&amp;#39;t want to come here to eat.&amp;quot; Some of the restaurant&amp;#39;s best dishes feature chicken, which should be a relief for those in the neighborhood who fear excessively fancy food. The wonderfully named The Whole Half Chicken incorporates four parts cooked four ways, and I&amp;#39;d rate them in this order of excellence, starting with the most luscious: chicken-liver mousse, fried wing, confit leg, and roasted breast. Complete your meal with Silky Cream, a cardamom-flavored panna cotta with date puree.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nComparable to Benu in distinctiveness and personal expression but absolutely unlike it in style is Atelier Crenn, where Dominique Crenn offers a cross section of everything the modern restaurant kitchen has to offer. She does so in a section of San Francisco dominated by neon-lit sports bars. Her restaurant, in contrast, is barely noticeable, the exterior understated and serene, mostly pale shades of gray and lavender.\n\nI don&amp;#39;t believe there exists a manner of gathering products, a method of preparing food, or a restaurant trend that Crenn has not embraced: home cooking, French cooking, molecular gastronomy, and foraging, to catalog those that came to mind during a single meal there. She loves farmers, and she told me she recently gave the owner of the farm that grows her vegetables permission to cultivate at will. &amp;quot;He asked me what I wanted him to buy. I said, &amp;#39;Whatever you want, and I will put it on the plate.&amp;#39; He bought $1,000 worth of seeds without telling me.&amp;quot; She reflects on Waters as no one else does: &amp;quot;Maybe people will slap me for this, but picking a vegetable, taking it from the soil, and serving it like that is really killing it. Maybe we can bring it back to life by cooking it right.&amp;quot; She&amp;#39;s a tattooed homebody with a killer edge, intensely competitive while at the same time insisting that all she really wants is &amp;quot;a nice house, a nice bed, a little dog, and to come here to work.&amp;quot; We spoke for quite a while, an inordinate amount of that time about carrots, although I&amp;#39;m not quite sure why.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nAnother of the new upscale restaurants (although a year less new than most others) is Commis\u2014the expensive spots deserve special attention because upscale cooking is what chefs claim Waters and Chez Panisse have suppressed. Commis opened in 2009 on a desolate street in Oakland that is rapidly gentrifying, although somewhat disturbingly. Already there are too many shops specializing in what my mother called &amp;quot;tchotchkes,&amp;quot; stuff nobody but a vacationer would buy. Nevertheless, credit goes to Commis for changing the culture of the neighborhood so that the innocents who desire such nonsensical items feel absolutely safe there. A year ago, when I ate at Commis, I almost swiped one of the rapier-like butter knives to protect myself while walking to my car.\n\nThat first meal was more than respectable, even though I couldn&amp;#39;t quite figure out chef James Syhabout&amp;#39;s style. The restaurant was severe and standoffish then. It still is, but Syhabout&amp;#39;s food has changed. It&amp;#39;s more refined, more mature, much lighter, and very artistic. He&amp;#39;s doing only fid-price menus, which seems perfectly suitable. Chefs as thoughtful as he is should be allowed to decide what customers eat. He was a longtime cook in the kitchen of Kinch, and he says that when he told his boss what he was trying to do and where he planned to do it, &amp;quot;Kinch looked at me cross-eyed and said, &amp;#39;Really?&amp;#39; &amp;quot; Clearly, the neighborhood has thrived because of his presence, and Commis has become one of the best fine-dining destinations in the Bay Area, not only in Oakland.\n\nOur first amuse-bouche was a Parmesan cookie coated in vegetable ash, more lovely than yummy but a clear window into Syhabout&amp;#39;s culinary mind. The second had both elements, plus creaminess and crunchiness. It was a custardy egg yolk in a date puree, with onion soup and malt-flavored oats, so impressive and singular I immediately recognized it as the star of my first visit there. Fava-bean soup, topped with a flowering sprig, was still-life in greenery. Grilled lingcod, gorgeously presented and accompanied by four or five other items, required picking away at the plate. That style of composing dishes\u2014generously offering too much to choose from\u2014might be the single flaw in the new Northern California cuisine.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nI&amp;#39;m not certain there is a better casual Italian restaurant in America than Flour + Water. At first glance the menu appears ordinary\u2014appetizers, pastas, pizza, entr\u00E9es. Yet thoughtfulness and masterful technique are abundant. Eat there and you might wonder why Italian restaurants aren&amp;#39;t normally this vigilant and ambitious. The recipes are original, the sourcing impeccable. The pastas are contenders for the best in America, based on their delicacy, flavor, and intensely concentrated sauces, which are applied sparingly. Among the best are ricotta triangoli in brown butter, pork-and-cabbage raviolini spiked with horseradish, and taleggio scarpinocc that look like miniature Chinese pot stickers. Should you like your pizza ethereally light, Flour + Water is likely to become your favorite San Francisco restaurant. The following might not be thought of as a welcome endorsement, considering my dated tastes, but I also admire the wall-of-sound music. The first time I went there, I walked into &amp;quot;Burning Down the House,&amp;quot; a song a little before your time but well after mine.\n\nSons Daughters is a marvel, the restaurant more than a few chefs told me I should try because it had no reason to exist. The pedigree of the co-chefs, both in their late twenties, is the problem\u2014they essentially have none. The two men are Teague Moriarty and Matt McNamara, who have contributed to their own obscurity by failing to put their names on their website. Before opening the restaurant, one worked at a high-end take-out shop in Berkeley and the other at a restaurant in Colorado. (McNamara also did stages at fancy European spots.) Moriarty wasn&amp;#39;t about to cover anything up: &amp;quot;People always ask us, &amp;#39;Who are you guys?&amp;#39; &amp;quot; McNamara adds, smiling, that so little experience is an advantage, because chefs with huge pedigrees don&amp;#39;t have such open minds.\n\nTheir plates have bushels of elements, another reaction to the austerity of Alice Waters. Such cooking has to be technically impressive, as theirs is, since it requires many ingredients to be prepared perfectly, then assembled. I was particularly intrigued by the abalone, a product I&amp;#39;ve considered wildly overrated for forty-two years, after first eating it in Saigon. Here it was pan-seared in butter. On the plate with the abalone was burdock-root puree, celery, salsify, olives, and a garnish or three.\n\nSo successful has Sons Daughters been that Moriarty and McNamara are now getting r\u00E9sum\u00E9s from cooks who have already been offered jobs by Kinch, the legend. They are trying to make up their minds where to go. Says Moriarty, &amp;quot;We say to them, &amp;#39;Go work for David Kinch.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nUni, or sea urchin, is masterfully enlivened with yuzu kosho paste, a Japanese condiment, and his carrot-fennel soup contains tapioca popcorn. He loves playing with vegetables. His asparagus was accented with a condiment that resembles authentic dirt but is considerably tastier. (Edible dirt is widespread in the Bay Area, probably due to Kinch, who came up with a coffee-chicory dirt in 2006.) The dirt at Commonwealth is made from dehydrated black olives crushed and mid with sugar, almonds, and chicory root. The dirt tasted salty, sweet, earthy, and bitter, everything your taste buds desire.\n\nFox almost certainly serves the most ambitious food in San Francisco at the most remarkable prices\u2014nothing on his menu goes for more than $16. His food is lovely, too, which I suppose can be credited to looking at so many pictures. He says of this means of learning, &amp;quot;Smarter guys than all of us have figured it out. We adapt it, make it more accessible, make it our own. Somebody else pushes the envelope, and what he does funnels down to us little guys.&amp;quot;\n\nBerkeley students were lounging on a grassy Shattuck Avenue median strip, eating leek-and-chard pizza slices from The Cheese Board Collective, as I walked toward the wisteria-entwined entrance of Chez Panisse. They were ignoring automobiles whizzing perilously close. They were ignoring Chez Panisse, a fixture in the neighborhood for longer than any of them had been alive, maybe longer than their parents had been alive.\n\nThe greeting inside was correct yet cool. Cuddly this restaurant has never been. My table was somewhat indecorous, with a sheet of paper atop the wood, much as a plastic slipcover protects the fabric on a cherished family couch. I am an admirer of Waters, although I haven&amp;#39;t met her, and I admit to being surprised by the extent of the rebellion against her principles. I did not see her in the restaurant, but then I&amp;#39;ve never seen her in the restaurant, and I&amp;#39;ve eaten there at least a half-dozen times. I frequently remind myself that she is really not a chef. She is, like Julia Child, a cook.\n\nI had the housemade rigatoni with Becker Lane Farm pork rag, which was watery, seemingly unfinished. A rustic presentation of wood-roasted sardines with chickpeas, tasty enough, could have been prepared in a cooking classroom. Still, offered that day were two items of enormous significance to the career of Waters and to the evolution of California cuisine. The first was a salad of baby lettuces and baked goat cheese, possibly the most influential dish in the history of American restaurants. Goat cheese, back in 1981, would routinely have been sourced from Europe, but Waters chose a local cheesemaker, Laura Chenel, and the previously insignificant American artisanal-cheese industry achieved credibility. The tiny greens next to the cheese changed forever what diners expect from a satisfactory salad and made seeking out perfect lettuces an obligation.\n\nThe second dish was plain fresh fruit in a bowl, which on this day happened to be strawberries untouched by cream or sugar or the hand of a French pastry chef who might be tempted to envelop them in a buttery crust. Two tastier symbols of the oppression of San Francisco chefs would be difficult to find. Waters fashioned her monumental salad at a time when the California-cuisine movement was barely under way, and her fresh-fruit-as-dessert concept was a more recent attempt to teach children to love nonsugary treats.\n\nThe salad these days is made with Andante Dairy goat cheese. That the cheese is no longer from Laura Chenel is entirely the fault of Laura, who five years ago sold her company to a bigger company, certain to remove her from the steely good graces of Waters. The cheese was creamy, warm, and soft, and topped with toasted pain de mie crumbs. The mid lettuces were photographable. The Swanton Berry Farm strawberries were red throughout and drippingly juicy, the kind rarely seen anymore, not where I shop. I could imagine kids forgoing their Twinkies for these, at least for an afternoon.\n\nIt&amp;#39;s difficult for me to conceive of a thoughtful diner, let alone an accomplished cook, disapproving of the warm cheese or the cool strawberries\u2014or of Waters, for that matter. I give her credit not only for discovering vegetables but also for helping liberate America from its dependence on the French-restaurant tradition. But I suppose I&amp;#39;m not in a position to understand how deeply subjugated local chefs must have felt, how stifling the dictates of the Chez Panisse kitchen must have become. In fact, California cuisine really didn&amp;#39;t flower, and in the past few decades, as American food became increasingly freewheeling, cooks in Northern California must have felt confined. A perfect vegetable on a plate has an abundance of integrity, but it doesn&amp;#39;t offer much passion or emotion. I suppose you could think of the new countercultural movement as an American version of la movida, with Waters playing the role of Francisco Franco.\n\nI also realize that Chez Panisse is rather elitist. I was reminded of it by the aloofness of the service and by the understated formality of the room. Bowien adds this: &amp;quot;The problem with Chez Panisse is that it can get a bit unrealistic. You&amp;#39;re supposed to go into your lovely backyard and get an egg from your chicken, and then you roast it over your fireplace. Well, I don&amp;#39;t have a fireplace. And I don&amp;#39;t have a backyard.&amp;quot;\n\nAlan Richman is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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