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The Semi-Fictional Book That Transformed the Culinary World | The New Yorker

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“The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth” inspired culinary luminaries like Alice Waters and Samin Nosrat. Does it matter that it’s largely made up?

It was early in 1985, during the first warm, blossoming weeks of spring in San Francisco, when I became hellbent on getting my old job back. Until the previous fall, I had been a cook at Greens, a restaurant run by Zen Buddhists in a converted Army warehouse by the bay. In those years, it was a groundbreaking place: a vegetarian restaurant that swore off the hippie health foods of the seventies and instead served meatless versions of hearty, provincial French and Italian dishes. Greens embodied the ascetic lushness of the farm-to-table movement, which, in Northern California, was synonymous…

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