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part-time during school, I moved from dishwashing to plating the salads, but the night I remember most clearly was when I was assigned to my first post “on the line,” kitchen talk for stations under the exhaust hood, working on the hot appetizers. From “hot apps” to fish then meats, from sautéing and roasting to grilling, I still have fond memories of being exposed to some of the very best mentors in the business, a brigade of dedicated cooks at a beautiful restaurant at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge named the River Café.
    It was there that I was also exposed to just how much time the chef, Larry Forgione, put into finding unique, fresh ingredients that were grown or raised in the States. I was endlessly intrigued, but at the end of each summer I went back to college. Later I learned that Forgione left to open An American Place in Manhattan, named by James Beard, the chef’s mentor and one of the foremost cookbook authors in America. College graduation brought me a job at a lighting and set design firm and I thought my kitchen days were over as I looked for a break into show business. But a few months later, Larry called and offered me a full-time position on the line at his new place. Unhappy with my job as a draftsman—where it seemed as if I would have to pay my dues in an office job for an eternity—I decided to cook and maybe one day become a chef.
    For the menu at An American Place, Forgione was creating dishes with ingredients I had never heard of, things like nasturtium leaves, fiddlehead ferns, and morel mushrooms. “Where did you find them?” I asked him. They came from California and northern Michigan, he told me, and added that in Europe all chefs learn to be foragers. Most of them, he said, regularly wander through markets and out-of-the-way places to find something interesting or unique, and then create a dish around it. As the cottage food business grew and foragers throughout the nation contacted Forgione, his repertoire continued to expand.
    At the same time, the California cuisine trend hit Manhattan. Simple, robust food came out of open kitchens with mesquite grills and wood-burning ovens. Reduction sauces gave way to flavored mayonnaise, and sprigs of fresh herbs were the garnishes instead of fluted mushroom caps. The entertainment of watching cooks prepare food while wearing black baseball caps in lieu of a toque—the classic French chef’s hat—added to the signature of this new wave of cooking that brought the high-quality dining experience many steps closer to being casual. Larry would say that what I was witnessing in New York was only a part of the California food world.
    The idea of heading west to check out firsthand the restaurant scene in San Francisco began to form in my head. When I told Larry, he urged me on.
    Once in California, I quickly found work at the Campton Place hotel under Chef Bradley Ogden, a friend of Larry’s. But any conversation about California cuisine’s beginnings invariably came around to the schoolteacher-turned-chef Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, her influential restaurant across the bay in Berkeley, where she successfully compressed the time it took to get food from the ranch or farm to the tables in her dining room.
    In the introduction to her first cookbook,
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook,
I read that her food was inspired by travels in France and by the cookbooks of Richard Olney and Elizabeth David. To that end, Chez Panisse was originally a French restaurant, modeled after the rustic dishes of the south of France, in particular the cooking of Provence. The influence showed in the dining room as well, where the walls were adorned with posters for films by Marcel Pagnol, the French filmmaker who had written stories based in Provence. I later learned that Waters was so inspired by these films and the lives of the characters that she named the restaurant after one of them, Panisse.
    France and food were bound up together for me as well, though in my