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easy menu item to find in the Bay Area. Still sort of a vegetarian at the time, I ate the iceberg lettuce salad, steamed vegetables, mashed potatoes, and bread, which was unlimited but stale. Somehow at Susie’s the bread was always stale, which struck Ned as one of its charms. Did they leave it sitting out to attain the right degree of dryness? I thought he was nuts.
    A signature dish from my grim kitchen was soy “meatloaf.” Chewy little soy grits formed a loaf that neither mustard, catsup nor any other sauce could moisturize. I liked soy loaf because it made me feel virtuous. Ned thought I was nuts.
    But this dark-haired, bearded guy with deep brown eyes liked the fact that I enjoyed learning about places I hadn’t been, restaurants as well as concerts and beaches. He made me laugh. We went to see plays and comedians, and waited to see the stars afterward at the stage door. I didn’t know you could even do this. After a terrible play, we waited for Katharine Hepburn, and Ned actually spoke to her, asking her to say the famous line from a good play, Stage Door: “The calla lilies are in bloom again.” She stopped and ripped off her whole opening monologue!
    Once we hit the food trail, vegetarianism started dropping like breadcrumbs. Others shun meat for serious reasons: to promote the ethical treatment of animals, to fight factory farming and agribusiness, to conserve resources, to rebel against parents. I just liked saying I was a vegetarian. It gave a person a whiff of superiority, the exhibition of steely control, like a Spartan warrior—in much the same way as anorexics regard themselves. Anyway, fancy restaurants were silly extravagances at a time of social upheaval and there was important community-building work to be done. Not that I did it.
    I was willing to be dragged along to all kinds of restaurants by a true enthusiast.
    Fish and seafood came back right away. Because, you know, if the restaurant’s specialty is roast crab, who are you punishing by not having it? And why live in the San Francisco Bay Area if you aren’t going to eat fresh Dungeness crab? It took longer to rekindle a love of red meat, but not all that long. I craved a hamburger every day of my vegetarian years. The occasional lentil burger looked the part, but it didn’t drip juices. On our first pilgrimage to Chez Panisse, which had quickly become the West Coast basilica of food worship, wouldn’t you know that that night’s entrée would be roast pork tenderloin? I could have asked for a vegetarian substitute, but I was starting to understand that my knowledge of food was very limited. If they had selected roast pork as the high point of dinner, who was I to say, No thanks, I’d rather have zucchini?
    Our social life expanded to include dinners hosted by Ned’s friends and colleagues, where the vegetarian stance felt awkward. None of the options worked very well. I didn’t want to tell them ahead of time and have them cook something special for me, or silently push food around and hope no one noticed, or say, “I don’t eat the main thing you’ve cooked here, but don’t worry, I’m fine.” Dietary restrictions had yet to become common topics of discussion.
    At home, Ned melted the rest of my resolve with fettuccine Alfredo and cheese-glazed chicken, which he served together. This was a lot tastier than soy loaf. However, his father had had several heart attacks. My counterpunch was to hector Ned into jogging, which at first he opposed because it was a fad. Ned eventually learned to love daily aerobic exercise. For my part, the fad of vegetarianism was over.
    When we got married, the fabulous food gifts included Calphalon pans, Henckels knives, and a gift certificate for dinner at the French Laundry. The little Napa Valley stone building that Thomas Keller would later turn into the country’s most difficult reservation was in 1979 just a cool destination restaurant in an actual turn-of-the-century laundry. You got the table