This pasta with cauliflower captures the best of California cuisine

Washington Post

04-05-2025

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.
Get the recipe: Pasta With Cauliflower and Chard
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.'
In other words, you, too, can make Greens-worthy dishes at home.
Reicher, 31, has spent her entire professional career at Greens, starting on an internship during her Culinary Institute of America training and culminating in her promotion to executive chef in 2020, when she redesigned the menu and committed to changing it more frequently.
Given that Greens is such a bastion of plant-focused cooking, I asked her what she thinks makes great vegetarian cuisine, and her answer speaks directly to the restaurant's mission. 'It's the same thing that defines any good cooking, honestly,' she said. 'Using the freshest ingredients, as local as possible, in season as best as possible. And just treating the food with love and respect.'
She comes to her global approach personally: Her mother is Ukrainian American and her father is Italian American, meaning she's just as comfortable with making pierogi as fresh pasta. She brings a little bit of California to everything she touches: Those pierogi are filled with peas and feta in the springtime, and that pasta is tossed with caramelized mushrooms and onions in the fall. The recipe I'm sharing here, for Pasta With Cauliflower and Chard, was 'inspired by a classic Sicilian dish but reimagined for the California springtime,' she writes.
Proportionally, the biggest components are the pasta (she prefers a long noodle, but really anything can work) and cauliflower, a vegetarian cook's best friend for its mild, buttery, nutty flavors, especially when it's roasted. Little things bring the punch: golden raisins, Castelvetrano olives, white wine, lemon and toasted breadcrumbs. Reicher calls for a separate lemon butter, featured among the simple recipes in her Kitchen Larder chapter, but as I discovered, if you're pressed for time, it's just as easy to incorporate some lemon zest and butter right into the sauce.
One of my favorite aspects of the recipe is Reicher's use of Swiss chard, a green whose charms are too often overlooked in favor of trendier ones. ('I think it must be because chard is next to kale in the supermarket,' she told me.) Like me, she's a fan of incorporating the stems rather than wasting them: You slice them thinly and cook them with the other aromatic vegetables the way you would celery, with the quick-cooking leaves coming into play later.
Reicher's approach to seasonality is refreshingly relaxed. Even though she conceived of the pasta as a springtime dish, she decided to list it in the book as a four-season option. And why not? 'These ingredients are able to be found year-round — something I find most comforting,' she writes, 'since I can and do want to eat this pasta all the time.' Now that I've made it myself, I know just what she means.
Get the recipe: Pasta With Cauliflower and Chard