If you buy something from an Eater link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics policy. A lot of ink has been spilled over Zuni Cafe, the iconic San Francisco restaurant that has been a bastion of California cuisine since it opened in Almost everything written about the restaurant shoehorns in a mention of the roasted chicken with bread salad for two, a dish that the late chef Judy Rodgers added to the menu almost 30 years ago.
Customers and reviewers alike love its unadorned simplicity β juicy roasted chicken with a burnished, crispy skin perched on top of a warm salad of toasted bread and seasonal greens doused in a tangy vinaigrette. I had my first Zuni Cafe chicken on a visit to the Bay Area in , when an old college friend suggested I meet her and her new boyfriend at the restaurant.
He was also startlingly handsome a doppelganger for a young Will Smith , charming as all get out, and gainfully employed as a lawyer. Over aperitifs at the crowded zinc bar, I decided that I liked the guy. Then we sat down to eat. When the chicken arrived, it was exactly as I had heard it would be: crackling skin, succulent meat, all set atop a colorful salad. After we served ourselves, I watched in disbelief as the boyfriend removed the skin from his portion of chicken and cast it aside onto his unused bread plate.
He also declined to touch the bread salad. I managed to keep that to myself, distracted as I was by the perfect chicken and otherwise charming company. The chicken was such a triumph that I bought the Zuni Cafe cookbook that night. Later, my friend texted me to ask if I liked her new love interest. Frankly, cooking from the recipe, all four-and-a-half pages of it, is a pain. Good luck finding a chicken that small, even at upscale organic markets; and regular grocery store birds often weigh around 6 pounds.
Torn skin shrinks as it cooks and leads to exposed meat that dries out in a hot oven. The chicken is then loosely covered and left to cure in the fridge for one to three days to brine and dry out the skin. Roasting the bird is its own challenge. Rodgers also failed to mention that high-heat roasting a chicken will fill your home with thick, greasy smoke. Ask me how I know these things, I have scars. You broil bread chunks and tear them into pieces; make a vinaigrette with champagne vinegar; soak currants in another kind of vinegar, gently warm not brown a few tablespoons of pine nuts in a baking dish; saute garlic and green onions in yet another pan; and then faff about dressing the bread with vinaigrette and then again with broth or salted water and tasting it many times, covering it, putting in the oven, taking it out of the oven, dressing it again, and warming a serving platter.
