The San Francisco Citizen

Things are speeding up at Slow Food Nation ‘08 in San Francisco.  After fighting the worm wars, it’s nice to sit back and spend $500 to eat some celebrity chef food under the rotunda of City Hall. It’s the Victory Garden Celebration Dinner on August 24:

District Attorney Kamala Harris, Peter Coyote, Thomas Keller and Alice Waters invite you to celebrate the Victory Garden on Civic Center Plaza. We’ll gather in the garden, share a meal prepared by Chez Panisse, and plant the seeds of victory at San Francisco City Hall.

Or just get a table for $10k and invite a few friends to have some paella, your choice.

Blue corn as high as a elephant’s eye, and it looks like it’s climbing clear up to the sky: 

See you there!

“The Slow Food Nation Victory Garden, planted by a coalition of volunteers including Mayor Gavin Newsom and Alice Waters, is an edible garden on the Civic Center Plaza. Planted on the same site as the post World War II Victory Gardens 60 years ago, the Victory Garden represents the values of sustainability, community and stewardship of the land, while producing high quality food for people in need.”

These days, a meal at The French Laundry restaurant up in the Napa County town of Yountville can set you back $240 or so, before adding such extras as a nice tip for the waitstaff [see UPDATE below], or a $100 “steak supplement,” or wine, or whatever. And that assumes you can even get into the fifth best restaurant in the world, as reservations can be hard to come by.

But check out this entry from a pristine 1987 copy of the Zagat San Francisco Restaraunt Survey (the Yelp of its day). Click to expand:

That’s right, Tim and Nina had an “estimated price of dinner” pegged at $29. (Compare that with Nob Hill’s Fournou’s Ovens, listed at $31 in the same 1987 guide.)

So you see, you had your chance back in the 1980’s, back before Pixar’s Ratatouille, and back before Thomas Keller ate an ortolan bunting songbird at a secret chef’s dinner in Bourdeax, France.

Oh well, c‘est la vie. Is there a relatively inexpensive place you can go to now in the bay area that will be internationally famous in the year 2029? Think about it.

Happy hunting.

[UPDATE: Commenter Chester has two valid points that explain some of the price inflation. Well played, Chester.]