Ask anyone in San Francisco for a restaurant recommendation, and chances are Zuni Café will be near the top of the list. Zuni isn’t the trendiest place with the splashiest fare, but the Market Street restaurant, celebrating its 40th anniversary, has been a hip destination since it opened in 1979.

Housed in a quirky triangular brick building, with tall, tall windows that let in the brilliant Pacific light on clear days and misty, gray light on cloudy ones, it has always attracted an eclectic crowd: near-penniless students and opera divas, lawyers and socialites, artists and performers, first-daters and anniversary-celebrators, youngsters and oldsters, locals and travelers, politicians and free spirits, serious foodies and serious tipplers.

In the beginning, when it was little more than a storefront with a minimal kitchen, Zuni veered Mexican. Billy West, the founding chef, served a stellar guacamole, prepared table-side in molcajetes, the volcanic stone mortars. The place was packed. A shop next door, Red Desert, sold giant potted cactuses.

When the restaurant expanded, doubling in size, it was time to hire a real chef. The kitchen was taken over and transformed by Judy Rodgers, a talented young cook with the perfect résumé for a somewhat-oddball restaurant like Zuni.