Stephen Downes

The more things stay the same the more they’re prone to change. That’s a rule of capitalism, and in the case of Zuni Cafe in Market Street, San Francisco, it has affected the restaurant’s signature dish, its roasted chicken.
I thought it was good enough four years ago that eating it was among the 100 food experiences you had to have before you died. It’s in my book To Die For. When I first ate the dish getting on for two decades ago, the chicken was a brilliant bird, salted a day before roasting. Just before being slid into Zuni’s igloo-shaped wood-fired roaster, chopped fresh herbs in olive oil were inserted under the skin.
Well, I’ve just come back from a fortnight in California, and Zuni chicken ain’t what it used to be: fresh herbs are no longer inserted under the skin. Indeed, not even dried herbs are, even if the quality of the bird is still terrific. I also felt the Tuscan bread salad that the dismembered bird lies on wasn’t as good as it used to be. Garlic-rubbed croutons were a major component, and today’s counterparts just seem feebler, less-cooked and less tasty. I also looked for but couldn’t find the dried vine fruits that were a part of the dish years ago.
I checked with the roast-chef, who said that, yes, effectively, they hadn’t been slipping fresh herbs under the skin for about three years. He couldn’t explain why. Like me, he said, he missed the old recipe.
And as we ate our way through a nonetheless splendid dish slated for two ($US48 or about $A60), La Dominique said several times that my version at home was better than Judy Rodgers’s original — she owns Zuni Cafe and still keeps a hand on the tiller, apparently. I said that the chooks I can get in Melbourne have a hard job matching the quality of those Zuni serves, but I did agree that I went to more trouble in diversifying the greens in the salad, frying croutons in garlic and olive oil, macerating dried fruit in a cooked wine like port before gently bringing it to the boil, adding the remaining liquid (and the fruit) to my dressing for my version of Zuni chicken and toasting the pinenuts a little more than Judy’s crew do.
But the lack of herbs under the skin — they make the dish — is a huge disappointment. And because of this unfortunate simplification, those with my book may now cross it off the list of 100 things you have to eat before you die. Delete page 48 and most of 49.