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I’ve been wanting to try the roasted chicken at Zuni Café in San Francisco for pretty much as long as I’ve ever wanted to try any famous dish. The caveat would be In-N-Out Burger, and both cravings are explained by the fact that I’m a multigenerational Bay Area boy by birth. (That will also play into my 30th high school reunion report below once we get this food and drink stuff out of the way.)
In the case of In-N-Out, the burger chain was a strictly SoCal affair until after I left my childhood home in San Jose. My first taste was during a trip with my dad and two buddies to see colleges during the summer before our senior year of high school. We stopped at what was then a brand new In-N-Out in Ventura — the same one you still see along 101 today — and loved the burgers (of course), but were befuddled by the fries (of course, though they do grow on you).
As for Zuni’s roasted chicken, it slowly creeped into my consciousness after being introduced by the Market Street restaurant’s chef/co-owner Judy Rodgers in 1987. (Eater.com has a great breakdown on the dish and its history here, and the café itself gives interesting details on the restaurant’s evolution here.)
My family weren’t exactly foodies, but we did stay loosely abreast of the San Francisco scene, so I recall at least hearing about Zuni long before I wrote about food for a living. (I probably have Herb Caen to thank …) But the chicken’s bawking on my radar really intensified over the past 20 years, as writers, chefs, and winemakers I respected kept singing its praises.
When I realized my reunion weekend schedule had a lunch hole in San Francisco on Friday, I booked a table at Zuni and got two friends to join. One is an S.F. native who I met at UCSB — he’s the banker friend in this New York City story — and the other is my high school buddy Danny Fortson, who actually interned at the Independent before me back in 1999, and now covers Silicon Valley and much else for The Sunday Times of London. (Santa Barbarans may also know his older brother, Dave Fortson.)
I stayed at Danny’s home in Berkeley the night before after flying from Santa Barbara to Oakland. We caught up with two more UCSB friends — one a kindergarten teacher, the other in real estate, though he once was involved in all of this Santa Barbara drama.
The evening started with a presentation at Donkey & Goat Winery by Matt Niess of North American Press about his use of American hybrid grapes. The wines were a little funky but certainly the best versions of those varieties that I’d ever had. I even bought a bottle of catawba rosé.
For dinner, we reserved one of the last tables at Pizzaiolo in Oakland. The four of us powered through salads of tomato-yogurt and watermelon-eggplant, pizzas of delicious but since forgotten combinations, and a braised pork ragù. There were multiple drinks.
Morning found Danny and I at Fournée Bakery, just a short walk down the hill from his house in Berkeley. The line was brisk, and the pastries approached perfection, from the cinnamon-smeared morning buns to the ham-and-manchego croissants we called breakfast.
Hunger had returned by the time we crossed the Bay Bridge and parked just off Market Street, which wasn’t as drug zombie–filled as it was a couple years ago, although Danny still suggested I take my bag into Zuni Café. He didn’t want me to get bipped — my new word of the weekend!
Our three-top was right next to the stacks of oak that power the wood-fired oven, and we ordered the chicken right away, even before our drinks. You’re warned in multiple places that it takes 75 minutes, and even the bathroom suggested flushing the wrong thing down the toilet will delay your bird.
It actually took about 90 minutes, but we weren’t concerned, catching up about our families, work lives, and old friends over cocktails, burrata with melon and pistachio, mushroom pizza, and shoestring potatoes with aioli. By the time the chicken did arrive, we’d cracked a bottle of Ligurian vermentino and were properly prepped.
Despite all the anticipatory build-up that threatened to thwart the experience, Zuni’s roasted chicken proved pretty damn good. It was crisp where it should be, succulent throughout, and very well seasoned — some might just say “salty,” the mouth-watering result of a three-day cure. That saltiness was immediately braced by the citrusy mustard, green salad, and tart currants, and then mellowed by the comforting, au jus–soaked chunks of toasted bread that live somewhere on the road between panzanella and stuffing. I’ll have to pat my own back by saying the vermentino was an ideal pairing.
Two hours into lunch, parking meter time was running short, so I sucked down a gin cocktail for dessert before heading to the Luma Hotel, a modern spread with robots-as-room service and dysfunctional televisions just a block from Oracle Park. That’s where about eight of us high school friends — now living around the Bay, up in Sacramento, even out to Charlottesville, Virginia — converged that night to watch our beloved S.F. Giants beat the hated L.A. Dodgers with a walk-off grand slam in the 10th inning.
It was probably the best baseball game I’d ever watched in person, and one of the top three most memorable baseball experiences of my life. Things like being at the earthquake game during the 1989 World Series — which I wrote about many years later for Time Magazine — tend to trump even the most exciting games.
Our 30th reunion was Saturday night at Bellarmine College Prep, the all-boys Jesuit high school in west San Jose that made college pretty easy for many of us. The day began with a train ride down the peninsula, some mediocre dumplings in downtown San Jose (we probably ordered wrong), and then stiff-if-simple cocktails at Henry’s Hi Life, which looked exactly as I remembered it as a kid when I’d go with my parents.
I don’t really have a comparison, but going to a reunion at an all-boys school seems a little less exciting to me than if there had been girls in our class too. That’s probably one reason I only went to one before, our 10-year, which was fine but mostly skippable.
This time, with us all approaching the mid-century mark, there’d be more to talk about, more successes and failures to compare. Only about 40 or so of us from a class of nearly 400 students showed up, but we all agreed that was actually a pretty good turnout. The school smartly hosts multiple reunion classes together, so the scene was full otherwise, and it was pretty amazing to see how much our well-funded campus has evolved.
I was surprised to not recognize a number of former classmates at all, though some became more familiar with a bit of context. At the same time, I doubt I was a memorable classmate myself — not a sports star or standout of any sort, mostly recognizable as one of the white boys from the browner side of town.
Our plans to hit the downtown bars afterward quickly improved to just heading to the backyard of a friend — also a UCSB grad — for a firepit and beers. In a stark reminder that we grew up in what became known as Silicon Valley, there was a robot dog outside, jumping around, lunging at our legs, and generally causing laughter and amazement, at least for those of us who’d never seen one.
Our ride back to the hotel was consumed by debating whether Bassnectar — a Bellarmine grad and the brother of one of the guys in our class who we’d been drinking with at the firepit — was more famous than DJ Jazzy Jeff of the Fresh Prince fame. The discussion, if it had any salient point at all, essentially came down to the demographics of differing ages and eras. We did not reach a conclusion — neither our Lyft driver nor the front desk people at the hotel offered an opinion — but it was a late-night lesson of sorts in perspective, especially when it comes to getting older and keeping up with what’s cool.
Our attempt the next morning to find a cool diner in downtown San Jose didn’t work, so we wound up eating spam-and-egg sandwiches with hojicha tea at a small local chain called EggHead Sando Café. Like our dumpling experience from the day before, the food and overall eating-out-downtown experience was just fine, though not very exciting.
In many ways, that still describes the San Jose scene, which is supposedly busier than when I was a kid, but still feels to lack pizazz when compared to the buzzing heart of San Francisco and even parts of the East Bay. Which is to say, it was great to be back for a short visit, but I’m definitely glad to be here.
Burrito Week Is Here!
I’ve been mentioning this for at least two weeks now, but in case you didn’t see yesterday’s paper, our fifth annual Santa Barbara Burrito Week is now underway. Until September 24, you can enjoy $9 burritos at nearly three dozen restaurants, from Carpinteria to Buellton.
And then make sure to share your faves on our Instagram with the hashtag #SBIndyBurritoWeek. We’ll publish our favorite experiences in next week’s issue. You might even win a $25 gift card to a participating restaurant! And make sure to tune into instagram.com/sbindependent this week, where we’ll be highlighting a few of these burritos with extra photos and videos every day.
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