With spiky petals that narrow into needle-like tips, a wild artichoke is a scary thing to behold - much less eat.

Yet that's exactly what more than 100 diners did last month in a dimly lit San Francisco warehouse, peeling off leafy daggers and sharing tips for extracting the tiny nubs of meat inside.

The occasion was an eight-course dinner extravaganza put on by Iso Rabins, the baby-faced, plaid-wearing founder of ForageSF.

The message? That there's more to uncultivated plants than their rough-and-tumble reputation.

"It's not just about green salads," Rabins says. "You can use them in gourmet and delicious ways and make really amazing dishes."

Foraging, or the sourcing of wild, uncultivated plants for food, is gaining an even wider following in the Bay Area as local and sustainable movements solidify their hold on the dining-out public.

From finding sea beans in marshy Marin County spots to picking wild radishes in San Francisco lots, foragers snuggle up to the environment by incorporating nature's offerings into their own sustenance.

While the practice doesn't come without issues - whether legal, ethical or safety - it hasn't stopped people like Rabins from turning foraging into a profession. Or kept inquiring diners from paying big bucks to try the next eco-oriented dining experience.

Last month's forage dinner, priced at $80 per person, drew more than 130 people over two nights. Attendees included colleagues at a South Bay biotech company and a Palo Alto mother and two college-age daughters.

The ambitious menu featured dishes like miso-marinated black cod with blood red daikon and quick-fried wild radish greens, wild fennel pesto over handmade gnocchi, black trumpet risotto with braised wild cattails and wild lavender-grilled duck breast, and local albacore tuna tartare with tempura-fried sea beans.

Not that everything actually made it onto the plate. A forage-based menu, after all, depends on what can actually be foraged in the days leading up to the dinners. And as Rabins has learned, Mother Nature doesn't always cooperate.

The wild fennel didn't look good, so that was out. Same went for the cattails, which were already past their season. There was no local tuna available for purchase either, so slabs of local halibut were used instead.

The last-minute changes didn't seem to bother the guests, many of whom had their first encounters with miner's lettuce, nettle and oxalis flowers. Between courses, Rabins briefed diners on the origins of the wild produce, sounding especially proud of the sea beans, or pickleweed, as they represented his first haul of the season.

"It changes your relationship with the environment," Rabins says about his monthly dinners. (The next ones are Friday and Saturday.) "If you know that the plants around you have a real value rather than just aesthetic value, it makes you look at your city in a different way."

Clearly, the curiosity and demand are there. ForageSF offers educational forage walks, which sell out almost immediately after they are posted online (go to foragesf.com). Experienced foragers share their knowledge about the ins and outs of the practice, such as getting permission from property owners and making sure the harvest is safe.

Rabins also runs the Underground Market and has plans to reboot his CSF program - the foraged equivalent of the popular farmer-to-consumer CSA, or community-supported agriculture boxes.

Rabins has sold wild mushrooms to Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Pizzaiolo in Oakland and San Francisco's Incanto and Front Porch. Plenty of other wild food can be found on Bay Area menus.

In fact, some of the region's leading chefs, including Daniel Patterson of Coi, Mourad Lahlou of Aziza and David Kinch of Manresa, forage for wild foods.

Patterson is set to launch a new website, Ingredient Lab, which will put a gastronomic spin on uncultivated produce. It won't be a how-to guide to foraging. "There's a reason that people have cultivated plants," Patterson says. "A lot of them don't taste good, and a lot of them are poisonous." Rather, Ingredient Lab will be a cooking site designed to celebrate wild food.

"One of the reasons that (many restaurant) menus look similar is because they're dealing with the same ingredients," says Patterson, who traces his foraging roots to 1993, when he first picked miner's lettuce. "You start adding these wild accents, some aromatic note that's unique, and it'll transform the dish."

At Coi, Patterson has used wild angelica root in a dish with morel mushrooms, fava beans and tarragon - the earthy and licorice notes of the angelica root playing against the sweetness of the fava beans.

"It's creating a connection between people and the place they live that might encourage them to be more inclined toward conserving and protecting," he says.

"If you have a house and a stand of elderflowers, you might think, 'Isn't it nice to put a pool there?' But if you grew up eating elderberries and have that emotional connection, that sense of smell and taste and memory, you're going to look at that as food."

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