Saturday, August 21, 2010

#1 Roast chicken and bread salad at Zuni (2009 and 2010)

A few weeks ago, thanks to the largesse of our family friends S&T, we headed to Zuni Cafe. My mom has loved the cookbook for years, and I've had fond feelings for proprietress Judy Rodgers since finding out she is both a Stanford and Chez Panisse alum. True to the CP ethos, she uses beautiful, farm-sourced ingredients, often presented with minimal intervention.

The menu changes frequently, but one of the standards is the roast chicken and bread salad, which takes an hour (cooked to order) and serves two. S&T split it for dinner, but I'm counting it on the blog because B and I each had a drumstick that night, and we took home a little bit for leftovers. Honestly, the leftovers were my favorite part; I made a delicious chicken sandwich for lunch the next day! It's good chicken (though maybe not "good frikin chicken"), don't get me wrong, but it just seems a little silly to order roast chicken in a restaurant when it's so easy to make at home. I know that the bread salad is not as easy to replicate as the rest of the dish, but, surprisingly for this carbo kid, it actually wasn't my favorite part (though I loved the currants, pine nuts, and arugula that the bread was tossed with).

The rest of our meal was great: we started with some fritti misti (including a fried lemon slice—who knew how delicious that would be!) and an excellent Caesar. B's entree was lamb prepared four ways, and I had carne asada.

It's a little too spendy for frequent visits, but Zuni is a San Francisco institution, and we'll certainly be back. In the future, though, I'll plan to make my roast chicken at home.

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