Zuni Roast Chicken
Lessons in high-effort simplicity from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.
In early September, I was in San Francisco for a wedding. The night before the big event, we planned to get dinner with friends and met up at their hotel. We got in an Uber, and on our way to another restaurant, we drove past Zuni Café. As we passed, I remarked I’ve always wanted to go there and my friends insisted we stop the car and change plans (I have great friends. Thank you Trevor and Lexi).
Upon entering the iconic restaurant, you are greeted by a certain kind of warmth that can only be found in California. The feeling is aided by a wood-fired oven with logs piled around it.
The wood-fired oven’s primary function is to cook the dozens of roast chickens that are served each night. In keeping with Californian cuisine, the simple roast chicken with crispy skin is served on top of a warm salad with toasted bread and seasonal greens. It takes an hour or longer from order to arrival at table.
If you look in the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, you’ll find that the recipe for this dish spans four dense pages. The entire book takes two hands to lift and comes it just south of 550 pages. Simplicity takes much effort.
I set out to replicate the dish in my tiny apartment. The recipe is so long and thorough, I had to write down my own version in order to see it all in on one page and understand the timeline.
The chicken itself is quite straightforward. They instruct you to season 1 - 3 days in advance. One instruction I missed but will try next time is turning the bird over after 30 mins, briefly roasting it on the other side, then flipping it back right-side up. My oven that does not hold temperature is unfortunately no wood-fired stove.
The bread salad has several moving pieces. The bread must be broiled, then combined with olive oil and champagne vinegar. Currants must be moisten with red wine vinegar. Pine nuts must also be roasted. Garlic and scallions must be softened. Chicken stock must be added. Then it must all go in the oven. Finally, the pan drippings are poured over the bread salad before greens are added.
The resulting dish? Magical. I have been craving the crispy, dripping doused bread, plump currants, and toasty pine nuts ever since. The chicken had crispy skin and was juicy, though tasted essentially the same as our regular, very similar, roast chicken recipe. The bread salad was the main event.
By the time it was cooked, it was dark out and my photo could not do it justice. It does however capture the ethos of Zuni Cafe — complex, intentional flavors shrouded in simplicity. I will make this dish many times over.
The rest of the cookbook carries the same ethos. Each recipe is turned into an epic — “[Modern braise] lacks the romance and risk of the original technique but relies on the same principal of trapping the meat as its juices in a moist, fragrant chamber surrounded by steady, low heat.”
Other dog-eared recipes to try next:
Chopped Lemon Bagna Cauda
Zuni Caesar Salad
Pasta with Giblet-Mushroom Sauce (the chanterelle ravioli pasta we had while there was outstanding and would probably have been the best pasta I’ve had at a not strictly Italian restaurant, had I not dined at Chez Panisse the night before )
Any of the many pairings in the Dishes to Start a Meal chapter, such as:
Six different ways to serve prosciutto, such as Prosciutto with Warm Roasted Figs and Hazelnut Picada
Three parings for air-dried beef, such as Air-Dried Beef and Fuyu Persimmons with Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and Balsamic Vinegar (pictured below)
Mixed Lettuce with Roasted Cherries, Hazelnut, and Warm Saint-Marcellin
While perhaps not a day-to-day go-to, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook is one that truly inspires, and one I continue to think about even when not cracked open.
On The Map
Discovery Wines
16 Avenue B
New York, NY 10009
The day after I turned 21, I was visiting New York. I sat down at a wine bar in Soho and Spencer asked the bartender to show me the ropes. He happily obliged and poured a few selections for me to try. He asked me to describe what I tasted. I drank from the first glass, and immediately identified the sweet, fruity flavor as Riesling. He said I must be either a prodigy sommelier or lying about my age. Riesling was the one wine my parents love and I drank on a trip to Germany two years prior.
That incident was the last time I felt like I knew what I was talking about when it comes to wine. However, over the past three years, I came to believe I must have developed some internal sense of taste, as every wine I have chosen and brought home has been great. Only recently when a friend who works in wine commented that my local wine store, Discovery Wines, is the best wine seller in the city, did I realize that I was experiencing the secondhand effects of expert curation.
What I love about Discovery is that they are down-to-earth experts. They meet you where you are and cater to what you want, not guide you towards a technically better choice. I always feel excited to go in, never prepared for the humiliation ritual I’ve experienced at other stores. They have a large selection of natural and small batch wines.
Every Friday from 6-8, they have free wine tastings. One of my goals for this year is to go more often to broaden my understand of wine. Check out last week’s newsletter for a recent bottle I loved and bought at a wine tasting at Discovery.
If you read the newsletter in a web browser, Dinnertime’s homepage got a facelift!
You’ll also now notice a few new links at the top to making browsing by category easy:
Cook - Meal In
Eat - Meal Out
Read - Off the Shelf
Host - Meal Prep
Finally, you’ll see a link to the Map! I’ve created a simple Google Maps guide that gives you a quick view of all previous Dinnertime recommendations in one place.
