This pasta with cauliflower captures the best of California cuisine

When you walk into Greens, the landmark San Francisco restaurant, one of the first things to catch your eye is a masterpiece redwood installation by s...

When you walk into Greens, the landmark San Francisco restaurant, one of the first things to catch your eye is a masterpiece redwood installation by sculptor JB Blunk: The main piece rises from the floor like some kind of giant’s gnarled hand, shadowing smaller tables and chairs - all of it cut from a single stump. When you get closer, you can’t help but run a hand along the smooth polished wood, and you can practically feel its energy simultaneously lifting and anchoring the room.

The installation, the other custom woodwork throughout, the floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of San Francisco Bay: Greens has never looked like your typical restaurant. And that’s fitting for this pioneer of upscale vegetarian cooking. In 1979, when the San Francisco Zen Center opened the restaurant, the first chef was someone who went on to influence vegetarian cooking in America perhaps more than anyone else before or even since: Deborah Madison.

Since then, the restaurant’s kitchen has continually been helmed by women. After Madison, the great Annie Somerville was executive chef for decades, and most recently, Katie Reicher has led the efforts to reestablish the restaurant’s place, especially after covid lockdowns, in the firmament of California cooking.

Her influence is chronicled in the new cookbook Seasons of Greens, in which she showcases the restaurant’s philosophy of providing nourishing, creative food closely tied to local ingredients and seasonality. Reicher has brought more global influences onto plates and into the book, where chanterelle siu mai, Creole pumpkin and collard greens soup, and masala-roasted winter squash take their place alongside grilled peppers with herby corn salsa.

Best of all for the home cook: These are not cheffy recipes. Some might be more appropriate for a leisurely weekend afternoon - I’m thinking of the luscious spinach and ricotta dumplings with cherry tomato sauce - but others are clearly aimed at that busy post-work evening rush, when the question "What’s for dinner?” can feel like more of a burden than a challenge. When I asked Reicher in a Zoom interview how she balances the kinds of cooking she does for the restaurant with the sorts of things she wants readers to make for themselves and their friends and family, she didn’t hesitate: "I didn’t change anything in the restaurant recipes except scaling them down.” Her "chef side,” she said, comes down to her insistence that the recipes "put in enough fat, put in enough acid, put in enough salt.”