It's no secret that Bay Area restaurant-goers can be a tough crowd.
The public's expectations mirror the high bar set by some of the country's top chefs, in turn motivating the chefs to continually refine their cuisine. And this drive to reinvent doesn't stop at the food.
We're not talking about high-concept tools once confined to a lab. Chefs are improvising with more down-home ideas, like running fish through a dishwasher as a no-fuss alternative to poaching or using a No. 10 can to weight down gravlax.
Bruce Hill of Bix in San Francisco and Picco in Larkspur, recalls how when he cooked at Aqua he would prop one saute pan against another, creating a slope so that fish would fit in the curvature of the pan, all to achieve the perfect, evenly browned trout fillet.
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Photo by Lance Iversen, San Francisco Chronicle