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Half Pig’s Head (“the perfect romantic supper for two”), claiming membership in a club of the unsqueamish, presenting friends with Deep-Fried Lamb’s Brains and a facial expression that says, “Oh
come on, please
tell me you’re not grossed out. I’ve
always
loved lamb’s brains!” David Chang’s recent
Momofuku
, too, packaged his New York restaurants’ recipes in foulmouthed conversational narrative and blurry photographs oftattooed diners in cutting-edge urban street fashions—some of them secretly famous, at least in food circles—reassuring me that hours burned on making Chang’s magisterial ramen would get me far more than a great bowl of food, it would even purchase entry into the hippest current clique of the like-minded.
    As powerful as Chang and Henderson have been in recent years, at least among people like me, they scarcely rank next to Alice’s own act of cultural litmus-creation. California State Historian Kevin Starr, recognizing her rare gift for envisioning a beautiful life and then announcing that she and her dazzling friends already led that life in a way that could make millions crave instruction on doing the same, credits her with making food-and-wine connoisseurship a key membership test for the liberal elite. “Let the rest of the country vote Republican and eat out of cans and packages,” he writes, in
Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990–2003
. “Berkeley would reform the world … while dining on salads of dried cranberry, pecans, and arugula, free-range fowl from oak-fired ovens, fresh-baked whole-grain breads, and an appropriate white wine, with poached pears for dessert.” And if anybody was a born sucker for this dream, it was me—not least because my very own Republican grandparents had proudly worn formal dinner attire to eat Continental brown-sauce dreck at their country club while I’d worn jeans and skateboarding sneakers to Chez Panisse itself, on my very first dinner date. Thirteen years old and I’d proudly led the pretty Miss Jane H. up the Chez Panisse stairs into the upstairs café, wide-eyed with wonderment at a glittering world of grown-ups. Nervous kid on a big night, I’d been absolutely thrilled to see my father’s law partner, Ted, sipping wine at the tiny bar. I still recall Ted’s affectionate smile, the way he leaned back and bellowed, “Hi, Danny!” so that I felt special. Ted knew how much I’d love beingtreated like a grown-up, out on the town, so he kindly introduced himself to Jane and then left us alone drinking water at our two-top and sharing a calzone. Hot raclette cheese melted out of that crispy crust, and I’ll never forget Jane’s young skin, her brilliant eyes funny and alive. And sure, the bill did come to a little over nineteen dollars, and I did foolishly imagine this meant that my single twenty-dollar bill was enough to cover the tip, but it’s all a fine memory nonetheless, warm and happy and fun—and those were precisely the feelings evoked by my opening the
Chez Panisse Café Cookbook
itself, when Hannah turned one.
    â€œAfter almost twenty years,” Alice wrote in that book’s introduction, “the Café is still a place where people hang out together, and measure out the years from Bastille Day to Bastille Day and from New Year’s Eve to New Year’s Eve.” And look, I knew perfectly well there couldn’t be a single, solitary, nondelusional, non-French soul in the entire Golden State honestly measuring out anything at all between Bastille Days. Nor was I blind to the overt salesmanship of Alice’s next bit about how “my old friend, film producer Tom Luddy, still drags in every foreign director and starlet imaginable… Retired professors and Nobel Prize laureates still lunch quietly, and our Saturday lunch regulars are still known by name to cooks and waiters