I Left My Heart....

San Francisco is still a great food city. Zuni then and now. Truly great chocolates. A vintage menu. And the best Jamaican patties.

I’ve been in the Bay Area all week, where I shared meals with old friends (Alice Waters, Traci Des Jardins, Loretta Keller), and made a new one, MacKenzie Chung Fegan, the new restaurant critic of The San Francisco Chronicle.

MacKenzie is the granddaughter of Henry Chung, who opened Hunan Restaurant in 1974 which The New Yorker famously (and ridiculously) called “the best Chinese restaurant in the world.” Don’t get me wrong: I loved the barebones little Hunan and ate there at every possible opportunity. But Henry (who lived to be 98 ), wasn’t a chef; he was a former diplomat who had great taste memory and introduced the spicy food of his native Hunan to San Francisco.

MacKenzie kicked off her tenure by writing about Zuni Cafe, another San Francisco institution I have always loved. You can read her review here. And you can read what I wrote about the restaurant in 1989 below. (If you want to know more about the late Judy Rodgers, a chef who inspired so many of us, I wrote about her in this article about the young women chefs of California in the eighties.)

Since I’m in San Francisco, I’d like to mention my latest discovery in this food-obsessed city.

Peaches Patties in the Ferry Building makes memorable Jamaican beef patties. I’ve eaten these addictive little pockets all over the country, but never before have I encountered one this delicious. The dough is buttery and flakey, and with each bite the tastes changes as you encounter habanero chiles, ginger, green onion…. I meant to take a single bite and before I knew it I had devoured the entire thing and gone back to buy another.

Here’s another San Francisco institution; Square One, the Mediterranean restaurant that Joyce Goldstein ran from 1984 to 1996.

I am not one of those people who is obsessed with chocolate. Or I wasn’t until this week, when a friend welcomed me to San Francisco with the Hanami Chocolate Collection from Dandelion. A limited edition, the confections celebrate the Japanese Cherry festival and they have changed my feelings about chocolate forever. They’re both sweet and savory, the flavors so intensely seductive that I found myself reaching for one, and then another, chasing the tantalizing tastes - yuzu, black sesame, caramel, miso, sake -swirling through my mouth.

They’re expensive.

They’re worth it.

Book tour begins soon: next week I’ll begin posting my schedule.