Zuni: Food That Comes Straight From the Heart

“One day,” says Billy West, “one of the waiters took a reservation for Elizabeth David, Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower--and forgot to tell me. When they all walked in I was shocked.”

So were they--pleasantly. David started telling her friends about the minuscule Market Street restaurant where the chef cooked on a grill set up in the back alley. It was in a strange neighborhood, and you had to climb a lot of narrow steps to reach the dining room. Having negotiated the stairway, you were seated at tables so closely spaced that a stranger at the next table could spill his wine and ruin your clothes. But San Franciscans, who have always been intensely interested in eating, thought that anyplace that those three ate must be pretty good. People flocked to Zuni; they liked the food.

That was nine years ago. Chefs Waters and Tower still eat at Zuni, it is still in the same location, and West, the young chef who remembers the thrill of watching three famous food stars walk into his restaurant, still owns the place. Almost everything else about Zuni has changed, but people still like the food.

“There are more people in suits than before,” says Judy Rodgers, who is now the chef at the restaurant. She opens the door of the wood-burning oven that now dominates the room (and makes trips to the back alley obsolete), and peers in at one of the plump chickens roasting in the fire. She looks about her--the restaurant has expanded in a haphazard fashion so that it now has the air of a casual country inn. A staircase sidles up one wall to the dining rooms that ramble overhead. The good scent of hardwood is everywhere, and people lounge comfortably about, munching on the anchovies that Rodgers cures herself. Waiters walk about carrying plates of fried onions, fried radicchio and deep-fried, paper-thin slices of lemon on plates garnished with homemade mayonnaise. The food is delicious--but it is more than that. It is food unlike anything anybody else is serving. It is rustic and sophisticated, and it comes straight from Rodgers’ heart.

“This is not,” she says emphatically, “a food temple. We have a kind of freedom; there is a perception here of a certain wackiness.” She considers for a minute and adds, “Most restaurants are limited by the expectations of the clientele. I think other chefs envy the fact that we can do such weird stuff.”

But it is not really weird--just different from what we have come to expect from restaurants. Rodgers found that nobody was serving the kind of rustic food that she loves. “People,” she says, “like honest food. My favorite dish from southwest France is grilled duck carcasses. When I put it on the menu, we sold out four days in a row.” Even thinking about it she looks slightly incredulous.

Rodgers serves stews and panades. She makes bollito misto. Zuni has come to be known for its whole chicken, simply roasted in the oven and served for two with bread and arugula salad. In the winter, Rodgers cooks cassoulet. The menu is whimsical, changing a little bit every day. “I found,” she says, “that I seem to do lots of traditional French food in the winter. And then, spring into summer, Italian food with lots of olive oil and tomatoes.”

When the restaurant opened, Billy West was serving the dishes he found in the books of Elizabeth David and Diana Kennedy. (“They were,” he says, “simple to produce.”) But when he started having bigger ambitions for Zuni, he talked Rodgers into taking over. “The first time I tasted her food,” he says, “I felt a rapport.”

Rodgers spent her junior year in high school in France--living in the home of three-star chef Jean Troisgros of in Roanne, who delighted in introducing her as “my American daughter.” She became fascinated with food and during her junior year at Stanford went back to France. After graduation, she went straight into the kitchen at Chez Panisse. She never looked back. Stints in various three-star restaurants in France followed, and she then became the chef at the much-acclaimed Union Hotel in Benicia, which set the pace for the American regional food movement. She worked in New York. She traveled. Still in her early 30s, Judy Rodgers has been seriously cooking for 15 years. She knows what she likes.

Rodgers’ idea of what a restaurant should be combines what she calls “that gutsy Italian food energy” with the feeling of a Paris bistro where you can get “great food at all times of the day.” At 7:30 in the morning, you can walk into Zuni and get wonderful toasted bread, homemade jam and eggs collected that morning from West’s own chickens. You can walk in at midnight and still get food, and if risotto or a truly extraordinary salad made of slivers of raw artichokes mixed with pine-nuts, parsley and thin shavings of parmesan cheese isn’t what you feel like eating, you can always order a Caesar salad. Rodgers has no pretensions and follows no rules. “We’ll always have customers,” she says, “because we serve hamburgers.”

This is a supremely confident restaurant, for Rodgers is one of a new breed of American chef. They are young and fearless--but now they are also experienced.

“I think,” says Rodgers, who favors casual clothes, wears her hair long and looks about 15, “that I’ve gotten kind of conservative in the kitchen as I’ve gotten older. You need so much experience to make decisions. You have to taste, taste, eat, listen. I don’t think about recipes, but I remember how I make things, and I’m amassing everything I know every time I cook. When the food is great, that’s why.”

Zuni Cafe, 1658 Market St . , San Francisco ; (415) 552-2522.