Kieran Healy

On the Road Again

I’m in San Francisco this weekend, going to a wedding. Hope you’ll all survive without me. Did I mention that I love wireless connectivity? Also, I love Millennium, a fantastic restaurant located at 580 Geary Street in downtown SF, in the Savoy Hotel. It only serves vegan food. I’m not a vegan myself (the chief ontologist is), but if you have any knee-jerk prejudices about what food made with no animal products whatsoever must taste like, then go to this restaurant and have your eyes opened by way of your mouth. There’s a line in a Terry Pratchett novel somewhere about the virtues of cooking under strong constraints about ingredients—it brings out the chef’s creativity. By comparison to Millennium, even good restaurants tend to look as if their only trick involves killing something with legs, putting it near something hot and then waiting till it turns brown.

Then you gotta try Roxanne’s, as the chief ontologist surely advised. As for Millennium, don’t read:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/11/CM156803.DTL

That could be like knowing you’re in the Matrix—but maybe not: de gustibus … .

Eh, the one time I went to Millenium I wasn’t particularly impressed. This was in January, so there wasn’t a lot of produce for the kitchen to choose from, but most of the dishes relied too heavily on meat substitutes (tempeh, seitan, etc.) for my taste, and the flavors were… insipid. I do plan to go back during the summer, though. (And my vegetarian girlfriend had an epiphany when she realized she could eat anything on the menu.)

Man, you guys are just killjoys :). The wedding we’re going to will be held at 42 degrees. How does that rate on the San Francisco Foodie Wisdom index?