Cooking for Your Friends | Jonathan Gold, LA Times, Dec. 4, 2013
If you have never stopped by San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe on a Sunday afternoon, waited for a table in the odd-shaped room, and ordered a half-dozen oysters before you even wedged into a seat, this week’s outpouring of love for the late chef Judy Rodgers may seem a little out of proportion. Rodgers ran a nice restaurant, but she was neither first with urban rustic cuisine — that would be her mentor Alice Waters — nor the first to populate her wine list with obscure labels from Italy and the Rhone.
Her insistence on dry-brining was novel, but less sexy than liquid nitrogen or sous vide. She was early on wood-burning brick ovens, but everybody has one of those now. She was process-oriented but had nowhere near Thomas Keller’s OCD-like obsession with detail. If you asked regulars what they liked to eat at Zuni, you heard a lot about Caesar salad; burgers; anchovies served with shaved celery and a bit of cheese; bowls of polenta; sliced salami; and bean soup. Mostly you heard about the roast chicken, an actual farm bird rubbed with salt, blasted in that wood oven, and served with a sweet-sour bread salad flavored with raisins, pinenuts, and bitter greens.
You can have a remarkable dinner at Zuni — you can always have a remarkable dinner at Zuni — of nothing but grilled salmon, roast shoulder of lamb, or local sea bass, accompanied by the same herbs and vegetables you may have seen in the Ferry Market that morning. The food is delicious, but no big deal. Rodgers wasn’t constructing an alternate culinary universe like Corey Lee at Benu or Daniel Patterson at Coi, she was cooking dinner for you and your friends. I have probably been to Zuni at least 25 or 30 times since Rodgers took over the formerly Southwestern restaurant in 1987, and I have failed to order the chicken only twice.
But Rodgers’ cooking was a big deal. That composition of anchovies, celery, and Parmesan, something you could probably put together right now from the contents of your refrigerator, was perfect in every detail, from the fruitiness of the olive oil to the fragile crispness of the celery, and you had never tasted an anchovy, even a house-cured Farallon Islands anchovy, in precisely that way. Each fleck of pepper spoke volumes. The aftertaste of the tart olive or two on the plate contributed its own complexity to the dish. Presumably, Rodgers was using the same Parmigiano-Reggiano that you could buy at the Cheese Board across the bay in Berkeley, but the shards you chipped off your block were rarely quite like that.
She was like one of those stage directors who knows that the best way to coax greatness out of her actors is to stand out of their way. And in her Zuni Cafe Cookbook, possibly the greatest, most generous cookbook ever written by a working American chef, she shared every technique she had.
The standard way of sniffing at the kind of California food that she helped to create is to call it Figs on a Plate. I can’t help thinking that if Rodgers had bothered to serve figs on a plate, possibly the cracked and shrunken Mission figs she loved so much with a drop of bitter honey and a dab of pungent cheese, they would have been the most delicious figs you had ever put into your mouth.
Judy Rodgers | David Lebovitz, December 3, 2013
I was deeply saddened when I heard that someone who happens to have been a culinary icon (and hero) of mine, and who I was fortunate enough to work with in the kitchen, is no longer standing behind her stove. This morning I learned that Judy Rodgers the chef-owner of Zuni Café, had passed. I was fortunate the work with Judy for a few years on and off at Chez Panisse. Judy was incredibly dynamic as a person; so much so that I think even she had trouble dealing with all her energy! She was also a dynamic cook. And like the best cooks, her food wasn’t ever about her: It was about the food.
The roast chicken with bread salad at Zuni was the most iconic dish she made and was always worth waiting for. (Although once we drank too many martinis from the bar while we waited for it, and when I got home, I realized that I’d skipped out on the bill! – which I did go back and pay the next day.) The Caesar Salad at the restaurant was the best you could get, as were the pillow-light ricotta gnocchi and the excellent hamburger, which was perfect in every way. Whatever Judy made, was the best. In fact, one of the best things I ever ate in my entire life was a simple salad she’d handed to me one night at Chez Panisse, composed of escarole, rabbit loin, potatoes, and garlic confit smeared on toasts, all tumbled together with a warm, mustardy-dressing. I never dreamed a simple salad could taste so good, and I still remember the exact moment when I put the first forkful in my mouth – it was so, so good, and I still think about it nearly twenty-five years later.
Judy wrote an incredible cookbook, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, which was a big hit. Not because she was a fancy celebrity chef (which she definitely wasn’t) nor because she was one of the most important people in the evolution of California cuisine. And not because the recipes for her earthy, deeply flavored food were so spot-on. But because her unique voice is heard in every instruction, every headnote, and every word in every recipe in that book. Each word remarkably conveys exactly what she was trying to say. I don’t know how she did it. But like that salad, she could be so evocative without making it seem like an effort.
She had a knack for unearthing condiments and combinations that worked perfectly. We used to joke in San Francisco that there was always at least one thing on the menu at Zuni that you had to ask a server what the heck it was. Honestly, I don’t know where she came up with all those obscure things. (And who knew that anchovies could make plain shaved celery taste so good?) On more familiar ground, her red onion pickles are the best possible use for the most common of vegetables and if you haven’t made them, put them on your list for the weekend. This is one of the few books that if you are a cook, whether you’re a regular home cook or a highly skilled chef, reading it will make you a better cook.
When I woke up today there were some random messages in my social media streams about Judy’s passing. She’d been ill for a while and although I hadn’t seen her in years, the idea of her being frail or not standing in front of the stove with her long, cottony skirt billowing behind her while she clumped around in her clogs, means that the food world has lost someone vital and important. She was someone I deeply admired and I was fortunate to work in the same kitchen with her, and admired her free spirit and skill so much that I often told her over the years. Of course, she totally deflected any compliments, waving them away. But to commemorate her life and talent, I can’t resist giving her one last nod.
