Famous Roast Chicken Recipe
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 1979. 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 — 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. But if you crack open the Zuni Cafe Cookbook and try to replicate the restaurant’s most famous dish, you’ll find a decidedly not-so-simple recipe and possibly a kitchen full of smoke.
I had my first Zuni Cafe chicken on a visit to the Bay Area in 2004, when an old college friend suggested I meet her and her new boyfriend at the restaurant. She was eager for me to meet him, as she was pretty sure he might be “the one.” I was impressed that he’d nabbed us a table — Zuni had recently been named Outstanding Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation. 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.
We ordered a bunch of starters to keep us busy while we waited the hour for our chicken to be blasted in Zuni’s famed wood-fire oven. 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 tried to concentrate on the conversation but all I could hear was the line from the Caddyshack golf club dinner scene where Judge Smails’s uncouth nephew turns to the woman on his left and asks, “Are you gonna eat your fat?”
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. “No,” I replied. “He’s no fun.”
I’ve been making the Zuni chicken salad recipe ever since that experience, but I’ve made several tweaks over the years. Frankly, cooking from the recipe, all four-and-a-half pages of it, is a pain. It’s written in tiny print with lots of unbroken text and starts with a long head note that goes over Rodgers’s philosophy about getting the right sort of chicken (it must weigh under 3 ½ pounds, and you must also know the bird’s name, provenance, and diet). Good luck finding a chicken that small, even at upscale organic markets; and regular grocery store birds often weigh around 6 pounds. I’ve adapted my recipe for the more common smallish 3 ¾- to 4-pound range.
