San Francisco Food Blog

David Chang (right) with Chris Cosentino before last night's discussion at Cafe Du Nord.

​If there's a takeaway lesson from fig-gate, it might be this: Don't drink on stage.

At a 7x7-sponsored panel discussion at Café Du Nord last night, N.Y. chef David Chang took heat for having being what one panelist teasingly called "drunk with Tony" when he dropped his now-famous diss on the city's food chops last month with Anthony Bourdain. Ar at least, that's how it went down here.

Even before he came to town yesterday for five days of appearances to flog his book, Momofuku, Chang addressed the crap storm his comments stirred. Last week, he told us San Franciscans needed to chill out and smoked more weed, even as he hawked the wider point that S.F. chefs aren't alone in a lack of imagination that yields endless iterations on the beet and goat cheese salad.

Maybe that's why Chang seemed content to let his stagemates hog the discussion last night. Incanto's Chris Cosentino and Christopher Kostow of the Restaurant at Meadowood in St. Helena turned the discussion into a revisit of the N.Y. v. S.F. meme, and a probe of the forces that keep American chefs from being avant-garde. Meanwhile, Momofuku co-author Peter Meehan audibly pondered why in the hell he was even on stage. The moderators were 7x7 editors Sara Deseran and Jessica Battilana.

Cosentino noted that all chefs worry what other chefs think of their food - a partial explanation of why some local chefs took offense at Chang's fig dig. As he did with us, Chang again genuflected before Alice Waters and the quality of ingredients in Northern California, but he called San Francisco's food culture "monotone." Kostow remarked that the city simply won't support what he called a "super-progressive restaurant," citing the ill-fated Winterland, which he said was "shit on" by local critics.

"Which critics?" Deseran asked slyly.

Hovering above the stage was Coi's Daniel Patterson, whose 2005 New York Times essay "To the Moon, Alice?" questioning the Bay Area's knee-jerk obeisance to the rustic Cal cuisine style of Chez Panisse. Chang marveled that Patterson isn't widely regarded as a city treasure. "What's the difference between what David said and what Daniel said?" Cosentino wondered. Kostow suggested that a lack of imagination isn't a bad thing for less talented cooks. "If you're an okay chef, I'd rather have you put a fig on a plate," he said.

"For a city that prides itself on its diversity, in the food world it's not," Chang said. "Why do we have to accept the status quo?" Battilana wondered if even as safely arguable a point as that might not read as arrogance coming from Chang. "San Francisco should be the culinary capital of the world," Chang said. "You guys can fuckin' kill me outside," he added. But no one in the standing-room crowd at Café Du Nord seemed remotely interested in that.