San Francisco Chef Recipes

At The Sentinel, Dennis Leary's riff on a Reuben uses locally made corned beef and fresh focaccia, but the sandwiches are just as delicious with top-quality deli corned beef and store-bought flatbreads.

Tangy feta cheese, a bright herbal pesto and a crisp bread crumb topping all elevate this tomato-bean stew. It's sensational made with meaty Rancho Gordo giant limas from Peru, silky gigantes or large limas from the grocery store.

The silky carrot puree mixed with the cheddar here is a terrific source of vitamin A and helps reduce the amount of fat in the recipe.

Replace the bavette with juicy hanger steak, which is less expensive. Skip the spice blend; instead, boost the flavor of the meat by marinating it in garlic, cumin and olive oil.

Traci Des Jardins created this refreshing salad to showcase one of her favorite Latin ingredients, the avocado. She tasted her first avocado during a visit to her Grandma Salazar in Mexico; she would snack on it at taco and fruit stands on the street, where it is typically served with fresh lime juice and chile salt.

To keep this prime rib extra juicy, "ask your butcher to leave the fat cap on before tying the beef," says Melissa Perello, an F&W Best New Chef 2004. Roasting the prime rib in a bath of butter, a common chef's trick that Perello uses here, also helps.

"Whenever you go to Spain, you always have beans," says Gerald Hirigoyen. "And squid is everywhere in Basque country, where I grew up, and in California too." Hirigoyen combines earthy black-eyed peas (which are a kind of bean) and quickly boiled squid with red wine vinegar and fresh herbs to create a bright-flavored, satisfying first-course salad.

Serve the beef with fresh lime wedges instead of a dipping sauce.

Michael Mina invented this soup in the early days of Aqua, the San Francisco restaurant where he rose to fame in the '90s. He started playing with the combination of black truffles and caramelized onions and went crazy for the mix of earthiness and sweetness. This version of the soup calls for truffle-infused pecorino cheese (sold in any good cheese shop), which is melted to form a marvelously gooey topping for the oniony broth.