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Introduction

Like the rest of America, California is unformed, innovative, ahistorical, hedonistic, acquisitive, and energetic—only more so.

—Wallace Stegner, Saturday Review, 1967

Perhaps because California has no past no past, at least, that it is willing to remember—it has always been peculiarly adept at trailblazing the future.

—Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows, 2003

When you go to a supermarket today in many parts of the country you are not surprised to find twenty kinds of extra virgin olive oils, some made from California olives. A plethora of mustards and salsas in the condiment aisle is to be expected. The produce section has bags of salad-ready baby lettuces and bins filled with radicchio, arugula, golden beets, haricots verts, and bouquets of fresh herbs. You could get lost in the cheese department while making up your mind what to buy. You can select pastured eggs, grass-fed beef, and old-fashioned pork from a Berkshire pig that bears little resemblance to the commodity-raised “other white meat.” When you go out to a restaurant, you don’t consider it odd to find goat cheese or smoked salmon on a pizza that was cooked in a wood-burning oven, or to be served soft polenta with a stew of just-harvested chanterelles or a Moroccan spiced lamb tagine on a bed of couscous. You have come to expect diversity of ingredients and flavors, and above all, you expect the ingredients to be fresh, seasonal, and to a large extent locally grown.

In the 1960s, things were very different. Supermarket produce selections were limited, and what little there was often had been shipped from far away, tasting a bit tired by the time it arrived. Bags of assorted lettuces or arugula did not exist. Herbs were packed in small jars, dried, their perfume lost. Most mushrooms were canned, and wild mushrooms were unknown to all except for a few hobbyist for- agers. In homes and even in high-end restaurants, many ingredients came from cans, jars, or the freezer, and rich, heavy sauces compensated for their lack of flavor. What caused the landscape of food to change so radically during the last quarter of the twentieth century? Many of us eat very differently than people did in the 1960s because of a new approach to cooking called California cuisine. It changed our expectations and opened up a new world of possibilities.

What Is California Cuisine?

The restaurants that I really like are the ones that don’t try to make you believe that you’re somewhere else. They tell you this is it, this is California.

—Chef Mourad Lahlou, Aziza

The world’s classic cuisines, such as Chinese or Italian or French cuisine, developed and evolved over centuries as part of a traditional culture. These cuisines are not monolithic—they are in turn broken down into many unique regional cuisines. Their recipes are rooted in the specific culture and environment in which they developed.

California cuisine, in contrast, developed recently and grew rapidly. For the most part it was unfamiliar, innovative, and electrifying, and yet, like traditional cuisines, it reflected its setting. It shares with classic cuisines a crucial feature: it is the food and cooking of a particular, unique place. In chef Paul Bertolli’s poetic rendering, “A cuisine is based in a place where food is wedded to people and soil and what can grow there and what can be made there from the natural resources, the land.” The state of California is extraordinarily diverse geographically, culturally, and ethnically, and California cuisine is a cuisine of diversity, open to multicultural cooking styles, flavors, and traditions. Our chefs may cook food of other cultures, but their ingredients come mostly from the same larder, stocked with the produce, fruits, and grains grown in our fields, the animals grazed in our pastures, and the fish pulled from our waters. California cuisine is the product of the state’s geography and climate, its abundant ingredients, its history of immigration, its support for entrepreneurs, and the ingenuity of its chefs.

Those who are interested in food will recognize its components: Baby vegetables. Gathered greens. Goat cheese. Pizza. Salsa. Other characteristics are equally familiar: Fresh. From the farm. In season. Local. Organic. Pasture-raised. Ingredient-based. Live-fire cooking. Open kitchen. Daily menu. Eclectic menu. Fusion cooking.

All of these are aspects of California cuisine, but most are not requirements. To belong to the California cuisine community, chefs do not have to have an open kitchen, although many do. They do not have to use a wood-burning oven or mesquite grill, although many consider that equipment essential to their cooking. They do not have to change their menu every day; they can change one or two things or just the sides. They can choose to list all of their suppliers and farmers on their menu, or not. They can focus on the Mediterranean, Asia, or Latin America, all of these, or none. They can spoon a Mexican salsa on an Asian fish. They can use Parmesan cheese from Italy instead of California and not find picketers outside their restaurant. California cuisine is a cuisine of options. It has wide parameters and no rigid rules. The one common element is that California cuisine uses fresh, seasonal ingredients, preferably raised nearby.

Unlike traditional cuisines, which have their roots in the home and community, California cuisine originated in restaurants. “There was no California cuisine at somebody’s house,” said Gary Jenanyan, who headed the kitchen at the Great Chefs program at the Robert Mondavi Winery. “No one said, ‘We’re going to Joyce’s house for California food.’ No one asked, ‘Are we going to have Italian or Californian tonight?’” Instead, California cuisine arose gradually, set in motion by a group of pioneering and passionate chefs who wanted to run new kinds of restaurants. Many were self-taught, while others had the finest European training. An unprecedented number were women.

In 1978, Sally Schmitt opened one of the first restaurants to offer what would become identified as California cuisine—the original French Laundry in the Napa Valley. This history is about people as much as food, and in these pages they share their stories.

SALLY SCHMITT

French Laundry, Yountville

Today anyone who loves food has heard about the French Laundry. But there was a French Laundry well before Thomas Keller bought the building and turned it into one of the most famous restaurants in the country. In 1967, Sally and Don Schmitt moved to Yountville to manage a new real-estate development called Vintage 1870. Their little café had the first espresso machine in the Napa Valley, to the delight of the local Italian community. Sally offered a simple menu of hamburgers from the grill and a couple of sandwiches. It was hard to get people off the highway in those days because the Napa Valley and Yountville were not known for food, but Sally’s delicious cooking led to a line out the door, and the Schmitts realized they needed a second restaurant to accommodate the hungry diners. When a space became available in the main building at Vintage 1870 in 1968, they opened the Chutney Kitchen, a lunchroom that quickly became the hottest spot in the Napa Valley. Soon Sally was cooking regularly for the St. Helena Ladies Luncheon Group. “They took me under their wing. They taught me how to set a lovely table and that the salad could be served after the main course. I owe them a huge debt.”

Next Sally and Don added a once-a-month dinner series that grew to twice a month. There was one menu and one seating, by reservation only. “We ended up cooking for seventy,” recalled Sally. “I don’t know how I managed. I was young and had more energy, but the thought of cooking a five-course dinner for seventy people frightens me today. We have five children, and the two oldest girls were able to help in the kitchen and serve, and [our son] Johnny, who now runs the Boonville Hotel, was the designated omelet man. The menus were all hand done, one for each table, with nice little drawings on them. Our daughter Cathy was very good at that.”

Sally was a locavore before the term was even coined. “I remember somebody was bringing people from France over, wanting me to do a special dinner and suggesting that I make French food for them. But my idea was to have Dungeness crab and artichokes, because that’s California.” She had grown up on a small farm, so it made sense to her to source food from as close to the restaurant as possible. However, there were few small farms that could provide quality ingredients back then. Neighbors would come to Sally and inquire, “What would you like me to plant?” but they wouldn’t follow through. She asked one man if he could supply her favorite beans, Kentucky Wonders. “I loved the flavor. That was before we ever had heard of haricots verts. He said, ‘Oh, anything you want,’ and then he dropped out of sight.”

Ten years later, after a dispute with their landlord, Sally and Don left Vintage 1870 and, along with a good friend, purchased a building that had previously housed a French laundry. The people of the community continued to refer to the building as “the French laundry,” so the Schmitts kept the name. They worked hard to maintain the property’s charm during the restoration. As Sally said, “It was a simple building, built by people who did not have any money. In our restoring it, we respected that and didn’t gussy it up, partly because of our belief that simple is better, but also because we couldn’t afford it. It turned out to be lovely.”

The French Laundry opened in 1978. Sally wanted to offer a single daily menu, but at first she wavered about the concept. “I talked this over with my family and said, ‘Maybe we should have a little steak in case somebody can’t eat what we present, or maybe offer them one choice.’ My children and Don said, ‘No, stick to your plans.’” She did, and her menu consisted of a selection of appetizers, a soup, a main course, salad and cheese, and a choice of desserts. The appetizers always included one fish, one vegetable, and perhaps a pâté, “so if anybody couldn’t eat lamb or was a vegetarian, we could substitute an appetizer for the main course or make them an omelet—that was the secret weapon. We tried to make the French Laundry as much as possible like entertaining at home. You don’t get a choice when you go to someone’s house for dinner; you are served whatever the lady of the household is preparing.”

Sally had one part-time assistant, who cleaned during the day and then went home, changed her clothes, and returned to wait tables at night. “We operated with a tight staff and our own girls. The French Laundry is on two floors, so we had one waitperson on each floor, one person to help me in the kitchen, a dishwasher, and Don to greet people and pour wine. We served mostly Napa Valley wine, although we snuck in a few outsiders, like a couple of Chalone wines that we particularly liked.” Of course, there weren’t very many wineries in the region at that point, so the French Laundry represented almost all of them.

The Schmitts ran the French Laundry nonstop for seventeen years, then decided to sell because, as Sally said, life in the Napa Valley was getting fancier and that was not their style. When Sally and Don read Thomas Keller’s proposal to gather investors and learned about the vast array of kitchen equipment and the anticipated number of staff, Sally was astounded. “It was night and day. I thought it could never happen in this small building, but he loved the building as much as we did.” Thomas’s transformation of the French Laundry into a world-renowned three-star dining destination put the tiny town of Yountville on the map. The Schmitts moved to Boonville and opened the Apple Farm in Philo. Today Sally and Don have retired to Elk and their children run the farm.

While most of the established restaurants in the 1960s and early 1970s were content to cook with generic commercial ingredients, supplemented with canned and frozen products, the new chefs wanted to serve fresh, seasonal food that could be cultivated locally, ideally by people who shared their passion for flavor and quality. Although the majority of restaurants had not been sourced this way in the past, it was not a wild or impractical dream. California had the rich soil and ideal climate to grow a wide variety of ingredients. But to change the existing supply chains, wherein restaurants were limited to a standard array of commodities offered by large producers, chefs had to first find and then support like-minded small farmers and ranchers.

Driving the produce revolution forward required the efforts of a diverse group of individuals working in different corners of the state’s food system. The pioneers included Georgeanne Brennan, who imported seeds from Europe so farmers could raise specialty produce; growers such as Warren Weber, Rich Collins, Lynn Brown, Bob Cannard, and Jeff Dawson, who slowly built up alternatives to produce grown on an industrial scale; Jameson Patton, Steve Walton, and Sibella Kraus of GreenLeaf Produce, who helped create a distribution network that could get local produce into the hands of chefs quickly; and Bill Fujimoto of Monterey Market, who connected growers and buyers and educated both groups in the process.

Chefs supported ranchers and poultry farmers who raised animals sustainably and humanely, and they encouraged artisans to revive the traditional arts of making cheese, curing meats, and baking bread by hand. A few artisans went to Europe to observe time-honored techniques. They longed to learn from cultures that had a rich history of experience, although their reverence was usually accompanied by the California desire to tweak the original. John Finger studied oyster aquaculture in Ireland, France, and Spain, and Cindy and Liam Callahan researched the making of sheep’s milk pecorino in Italy. Laura Chenel, one of the most widely respected early artisans, briefly apprenticed to a cheese-making family in France.

LAURA CHENEL

Laura Chenel’s Chèvre, Sebastopol

Goat cheese producers around the country refer to Laura Chenel as the mother of them all. Laura Werlin, the author of award-winning books on American cheeses, thought that “Laura Chenel’s goat cheese was the start of the artisan movement.” Her initial effort yielded a soft, creamy fresh cheese, and as her skill grew, her offerings included olive oil– marinated cabecou, aged crottin, and ash-coated taupinière.

Laura Chenel was born and raised in Sonoma County. Her interest in the back-to-the-land movement led her, in the 1970s, to start a small farm in Sebastopol with bees, chickens, a couple of goats, a vegetable garden, and fruit trees. “The idea was that if the world was going to come to an end, I wanted to be able to produce my food. I made kefir and yogurt and all that stuff. I fell in love with the goats, a deep connection that exists to this day.”

Her goats provided so much milk that Laura decided to make cheese. “I mailed away for the government pamphlet on how to make cheese. It never worked out—it was horrible. I kept trying and trying.” One day someone brought her a piece of French goat cheese, and as soon as she tasted it she knew that this was what she aspired to create.

Laura went back to school to learn French and then wrote for advice to Jean-Claude Le Jaouen, who had recently published The Fabrication of Farmstead Goat Cheese, his now-classic book for artisanal cheese makers. He invited her over, and she found somebody to take care of her goats in California while she undertook a brief apprenticeship, or stage, in Europe.

“Jean-Claude got me a stage in the southwestern part o f France in a l ittle mountaintop village. I was there for about a month with some really nice people who had about eighty to one hundred goats. We took them out to graze, and milked them, and made cheese. I was avid in wanting to learn, and they were grateful to have me, because the work is 24/7. From there I went to a second family in the Loire. When they knew I could make cheese, they took off for Italy. They hadn’t had a vacation in who knows how long.” In all, Laura lived with four families, and she recalled that by the time she left, she wanted “to stay and do this forever.”

Flying back to America in tears, she told herself, “I’m going to give this about a year and if it doesn’t happen, I’m going to come back.” But it did work out and, starting in 1979, Laura was making cheese daily. One day Helen Allen, co-owner of the Wine and Cheese Center near San Francisco’s Jackson Square, introduced her to Alice Waters. “I thought, ‘A restaurant? What’s a restaurant going to want with cheese?’” But that encounter changed her life. After she started selling to Chez Panisse, cheese shops and chefs from all over California started ordering her products. In 1981, while I was the chef at Chez Panisse Café, we would send someone to the bus station every day to pick up a drippingwet box of fresh goat cheese for our signature salad. Soon Wolfgang Puck was using Laura Chenel’s chèvre on his pizza. Square One wrapped it in phyllo and baked it to serve with a pear, endive, and walnut salad. Others bundled it in grape leaves and grilled it. The impact of Laura Chenel’s cheese was felt as far away as New York, where chef Larry Forgione at the restaurant An American Place incorporated it into a strawberry cheesecake. The ubiquitous goat cheese became a symbol of California cuisine.

Laura would visit restaurants to train the staff how to use and store goat cheese, giving them samples of a range of cheeses, from mild and young to sharp and aged. In 1983, when she went to Cindy Pawlcyn’s Mustards Grill to show the staff her cheeses, she brought a newborn goat with her to win them over.

Laura inspired others to try their hand at cheese making, especially women. “I think that aspect was critical,” she remarked. “Cheese had been a very traditional male-dominated [business].” She paved the way for Mary Keehn at Cypress Grove, SoYoung Scanlon at Andante, Cindy and Liam Callahan at Bellwether Farms, and Jennifer Lynn Bice at Redwood Hill Farm.

In 2006, after thirty years of making cheese, Laura sold her company to a French business. “I knew the man’s father when I’d been to France, so I respected the company. I didn’t have it for sale, they just called. It was time. I was tired.” She said that the transition was gradual. “I ended up spending almost four years side by side with them making cheese and tending my goats. The goats just this spring [2010] went to their new home, built from scratch for them. So they’re happy and I’m now going, ‘Okay, who am I? What am I going to do?’”

While respect for custom and convention helped Europeans preserve their culinary practices, it also made them less open to the food of other cultures. Californians, on the other hand, embraced multicultural cooking. According to Harvey Steiman, editor-at-large of Wine Spectator magazine, home cooks had begun to explore “diverse cooking perspectives” as early as the mid-twentieth century. “Pick up any issue of Sunset magazine from the 1950s and you will find Mexican, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and other cultures represented not just by their own dishes but by new dishes that incorporate ingredients and techniques from those cultures.” However, it wasn’t until California chefs picked up these cultural threads and started to weave them together that California cuisine was born.

It took time for this diversity to be fully accepted. Food writer Janet Fletcher observed that for some white California residents in the 1940s through the 1960s, this was “the food of the other, whether it was Southeast Asian or Indian or Mexican or Japanese. Eventually California became so multiethnic, so diverse—you lived next to people from other countries, you worked with them—that there was no longer that sense of the other, and this became our food too.” Instead of an awkward intrusion into the cultural status quo, California’s multicultural diversity became an enrichment that contributed to the development of its cuisine. Some chefs, such as Barbara Tropp at China Moon, focused on foods from a specific culture, faithfully honoring those recipe traditions. Others, like Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger at City Restaurant in Los Angeles, served traditional dishes from many cultures on one eclectic menu. Still others, like Roy Yamaguchi at 385 North in West Hollywood, experimented with fusion cooking.

California cuisine was further distinguished by an emphasis on techniques and equipment that were not part of the European-style restaurant kitchen, such as live-fire cooking on a grill or in a wood-burning oven. Chef Tony Gulisano, who did a stint behind the grill at Prego in Los Angeles, asserted that “the whole start of the California food movement was that wood grill.” At Prego, “the grill was full for hours straight. That was the distinct component that differentiated it from the past. It was attractive to the general public as well—smelled good.” The open kitchen, another signature of California cuisine, permitted customers to watch chefs at work, a dynamic that changed a restaurant’s atmosphere, style of service, and dining experience.

Only in California

I’m not sure it could have happened anywhere else on the planet. You needed this amazing confluence of circumstance—this collection of people, the land, the climate.

—Chef Judy Rodgers, Zuni Café

The conditions that led to the growth of California cuisine were the result of happenstance and a gathering of talented, well-traveled, and intelligent people who were in the right place at the right time. But these people needed raw materials, and California, the nation’s largest food-producing state, had them in abundance. California agriculture encompasses not only fruits and vegetables but dairy, livestock, and poultry. Dry in the south, wet in the north, cool on the coast, and warm in the inland valleys, the state’s microclimates give chefs year-round access to fresh produce. Variations in weather and soil permit California farmers to grow or raise almost anything imaginable, from cool-climate greens to tropical fruits: avocados and heirloom vegetables in San Diego County; lettuce, artichokes, and strawberries in Monterey County; rice in Sutter County; grapes in counties up and down the coast and in the Central Valley; pears, asparagus, and corn in the Sacramento Delta; dates in the desert. The San Joaquin Valley offers the greatest fecundity and diversity, producing dairy products and beef, as well as nuts, citrus, stone fruit, and melons.

This plenitude had a seductive pull on chefs. Chef Corey Lee came to cook at the French Laundry in the Napa Valley, planning to return later to his native New York to open his own restaurant. But after four and a half years as sous chef and then chef de cuisine, Corey told Thomas Keller, “I don’t think I’m going to go back to New York.” “He had become so accustomed to the quality of the vegetables in California,” said Thomas, “that he couldn’t see himself being as successful outside of the state. That is significant, when somebody who has all his life wanted to open a restaurant in New York realizes that he will be happier here because of the products. There’s no place I’ve been in our country that has the raw products that we have here in California, and we’re blessed.”

But the entrepreneurial climate of California may have been as important in the genesis of California cuisine as the accommodating weather. Cookbook author and former Cocolat owner Alice Medrich, who grew up in Los Angeles, thought historian Kevin Starr, in his book Coast of Dreams, captured the state’s spirit. “Basically he says that California is to the rest of the country, and especially the eastern establishment, as the New World was to Europeans. People who didn’t have prospects, or who had a sense of adventure, came here with all these dreams, and so this is the birthplace of all the crazy ideas that have now become very mainstream.”

Californians chose not to emulate the static, orderly societies of the East Coast and Europe. In the relatively young and developing region they felt at liberty to pursue their ambitions, and by virtue of their enterprise the economy began outperforming that of the rest of the nation. This attracted more innovators, who came to share in the opportunities and bring their visions to life. Creative Californians developed such whimsical commodities as fortune cookies, Popsicles, Barbie dolls, blue jeans, boysenberries, and white Zinfandel wine. The state also produced two radically different models of eating: California cuisine and what might appear to be its very antithesis—the hamburger fast-food joint, which began when Ray Kroc bought his first McDonald’s restaurant in Southern California in the 1950s. By 1970, California had become the most populous state in the union, and its prodigious appetites fueled both ways of eating.

The permissive restaurant culture allowed for many culinary points of view. While the East Coast continued to be Eurocentric, the wide parameters and flexible rules of California cuisine gave chefs the freedom to cook in ways that reflected their individual predilections and cultural bent. When chefs cooked traditional food—based on flavors, ingredients, and dishes they had tasted and wished to eat again—they were cooking the food of memory. They had a benchmark for flavor imprinted on their palate. Their goal was to try to match the original dish: the beef daube they ate in France, the spaghetti alla carbonara in Italy, the romesco sauce in Spain, or their family’s version of Vietnamese pho or Moroccan tagine of chicken with preserved lemon and olives. While they could not reproduce it using ingredients cultivated in the original country’s terroir, they sought the best ingredients they could find and used tried-and-true techniques to get as close as they could to what they remembered. They might put their personal imprint on the recipe, but it was still recognizable. The resulting dish could be predictable and boring, right on the money, or sublimely inspired, depending upon the chef’s larder and skill at the stove, and the accuracy of his or her memory.

Other chefs wanted to break away from cooking traditional and predictable food, wanting instead to create dishes they had never tasted but only fantasized about—the food of dreams. Yet they could not work in a vacuum, so they took familiar and available ingredients and combined them in unusual ways or tried out innovative techniques to make a dish with their personal imprint. They had no flavor benchmark or taste memory to match, but ventured into the unknown with every dish. Their success was dependent upon their technical skills, culinary experience, and creativity in transforming an idea into an edible reality. The resulting dish could be anything: confused, terrible, challenging, interesting, or pure magic.

Chefs took chances either way, but that freedom to take risks was one of the keys of California cuisine. California celebrated iconoclasts, which enabled often inexperienced newcomers to open restaurants, create new artisanal food products, and make wine. “They could start up a business and not be slapped down because they didn’t fit into a mold,” said Bob Long of Long Vineyards. “They could experiment and try their ideas out. And they had a relatively accepting audience because the people here were saying, ‘Well, okay, why not?’”

At a time when upscale European and North American restaurant culture was dutifully following the classical conventions and recipe strictures of the influential French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier, Californians were doing their own thing. In the 1970s and 1980s, said restaurateur Narsai David, “you’d have had a hard time in a French restaurant finding fresh ginger. Escoffier taught that ginger is this powdered stuff you put in spice cake. California cuisine made an impact because we were not bound by the traditions of the French. Here on the West Coast, we were open to ideas. We just did the things that were appealing to us.”

Although in many respects California cuisine was beholden to European know-how, “California itself, as the end of the western ideological expansion of America, represents the getting away from the status and class system of Europe to celebrate the idealization of individualism and the power of the individual,” according to chef Mark Miller. “California cuisine, by its nature, has to be revolutionary in terms of not only its fashion, its style, but also its culinary ethos. It cannot be a repeat. The Chinese have a saying, ‘you can hold on to the past or you can create the future,’ and California was about creating the future. It was America’s frontier.”

The Revolutionary Years

This history focuses on the years 1970 to 2000, which were the most transformative in the development of California cuisine. The movement had repercussions in agriculture, the wine industry, and restaurant design. Developments during those thirty years had an enormous impact on the quality, freshness, availability, and diversity of the raw materials at chefs’ disposal. The California restaurant wine list became a model for restaurants all over the country. The open kitchen allowed a more casual but still professional style of service. By the late 1990s, California cuisine had begun to influence every aspect of the food universe: home as well as restaurant cooking, what was grown, how it was grown, how fresh it had to be, and where it could be purchased.

Calling California cuisine a revolution implies a note of finality, as if it’s over and the changes are accomplished and goals achieved. But it continues to evolve. This history stops at 2000 because in the years that followed, food writers and food entrepreneurs, competing in an increasingly dense and crowded arena for the attention of diners and consumers, have tended to make every little change, every new chef or restaurant trend, every novel farm or ingredient seem important and groundbreaking. This has obscured the fact that the pace of change in the culinary world has slowed since the turn of the millennium. Compared to the revolutionary changes in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, what’s happened in the culinary world over the past fifteen years or so has been mostly evolutionary, with variations on and extensions of earlier innovations.

Over the years, California has influenced the rest of the country. In the early 1980s, when California chefs Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel were hired to revamp Maxwell’s Plum restaurant in New York, pickings were slim for seasonal vegetables. Today, the selection at the Union Square Greenmarket is much improved, although it still seems limited compared to the abundance and variety found at the San Francisco Ferry Plaza or Santa Monica farmers’ markets. In 1998, Suzanne Goin of Lucques reported that, after four days of dining out in New York, she despaired of getting a decent salad or seeing any vegetables on the plate. “They weren’t part of the dining culture. It was protein and sauce, protein and sauce,” a reflection of the lingering European influence on East Coast cooking.

For years it drove East Coast chefs crazy to visit California, see the markets, and listen to their California counterparts rhapsodizing about ingredients, especially when they had to place orders with California produce companies to tide them over during the months when their walk-in refrigerators were bare. Even as recently as 2009, David Chang of New York’s Momofuku made the calculated press-grabbing remark that “fuckin’ every restaurant in San Francisco is just serving figs on a plate,” implying that California chefs lacked culinary chops. We don’t need Freud to recognize produce envy. But I suspect that by now Chang has forgiven us for flaunting our figs. Because today, thanks to the California culinary revolution, chefs all over the country have closer connections to farms and ranches. Farmers’ markets have expanded. We are all eating better, fresher, and more varied food.