The output of the kitchen is staggering, especially considering the equipment in use: "We have four burners and one shitty oven that doesn't work," Bowien says. The menu lists twenty-six items, counting his slow-cooked non-Chinese barbecue—beef brisket, pork trotters, and lamb cheeks. Nothing on the menu is priced at more than $12.50, and seventy-five cents is donated to the San Francisco Food Bank for every entrée sold.

The corned beef in his celebrated kung pao corned beef, made on premises, tastes like New York smoked pastrami. Greaseless, fluffy salt-cod fried rice, an homage to the Chinese love of salted fish, and Westlake Rice Porridge, thick with chunks of fresh Dungeness crab and flavored with oxtail and cilantro, got me infatuated with two dishes that hadn't interested me before. The dish called thrice-cooked bacon is made with $7-per-pound Tennessee bacon and is accompanied by a tale of vindication. His agreement with the owners of Lung Shan calls for them to pay all food costs for the restaurant, and, Bowien says, "We were having crazy fights at the beginning, because we use Creekstone Farms meat, and they said that the Benton's bacon was seven times as much as what they were paying. The turning point arrived when we found ourselves running short of bacon, it was going too fast, and we discovered that their family and chefs were eating immense amounts of our food, it was so much better than what they usually had for themselves."

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The emergence of these new San Francisco restaurants marks an end to the influence of old-style California cuisine, which blossomed in the '70s. There really were two versions. The first, in the south, was characterized by Wolfgang Puck's sweet, colorful, creamy, and spicy food, as well as his haute pizza. The second, in the north, was defined by Alice Waters and her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971 with an irresistibly simple message: fresh food. Amazingly, nobody had thought of it before. It swept away other trends, other food philosophies. Suddenly, filet mignon with a baked potato was no longer the standard for fine dining in America.

What Puck, Waters, and all the other old-Calfornia-cuisine chefs espoused was informality, accompanied by modest forays into the spices and flavors of foreign cuisines. These were usually Mediterranean, although Puck would later open his wildly successful Chinois. Waters and Chez Panisse back then seemed only a part of what was a widespread movement, but they have remained the enduring symbols of all that was California cuisine. I remember only one other Northern California food-preparation trend that thrived after her ascendancy: grilling meats and vegetables using vine cuttings as fuel. Napa Valley chefs marveled at the differences that Pinot Noir and Cabernet imparted, not that there were any.

Suddenly and shockingly, the fundamental tenets of Waters are under assault. She is perceived as puritanical and minimalist, while the young chefs see their food as sensual and themselves as maximalists. I suspect they began to resent being lower on the celebrity food chain than the local, organic, and sustainable vegetables and meats that Waters celebrated and they still buy. Says Thomas McNaughton, chef of Flour + Water restaurant, "For so long the school of thought has been 'Here is a beautiful turnip; why do anything to change it?' Now we are saying, 'Here is a beautiful turnip with layers of flavor. I can develop it in different ways.' " Adds Teague Moriarty, co-chef of Sons Daughters restaurant, "It's an Alice Waters backlash."

Chefs do not want the head of Waters, but they do want her throne, and they want an end to the worship of simplicity. "The church of the philosophy of Alice Waters had a lot of followers, but nobody went outside the box," says McNaughton. They're beating up on her beloved farms, too. They dislike having to spell out on menus where products were grown or raised, or in the case of seafood, the boat it rode in on. They no longer wish to train their staffs to discuss agriculture or animal husbandry. "It had gotten so that everybody who came to eat in a restaurant had to know where the chicken was from. They had a sense of entitlement to that information," says Bowien. "We don't think you should spend thirty minutes of your meal talking about your food. We're not saving lives here. We're not paramedics."