Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Ana Gonzalez, through this complicated country.

We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories, their poetry, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature, and get closer to the things we're missing.

Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC, wherever you get podcasts.

Hey, I'm Frances Lamb, and this is our mini podcast, Splendid Table Select.

Our presenting sponsor is Bob's Red Mill.

They're an employee-owned company that's offered organic, gluten-free, stone-ground products for decades,

and they're experts at making healthy taste amazing.

All right, welcome to 2019.

But today on the show, we're actually going to take a little detour back in time to

the 70s, to the beginning of the American Restaurant Revolution.

It was a time when young, talented chefs started opening restaurants that didn't feel

bound to tradition, and it was when cooking first became cool.

The writer Andrew Friedman runs a website about chefs called Toclad, and he says the energy at

that time was just palpable. He wrote a book about it called chefs, drugs, and rock and roll.

And a friend Russ Parsons talked to him. Have a listen.

Now in the book, you focused primarily on the restaurant scenes in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Each of those share some

similarities, but each is also very different. What were the similarities and differences that

you found? Well, for me, being focused really on the chefs more than anything, I think it's very easy to identify what we might call the archetypical New York, Bay Area, and Los Angeles chefs of the time.

I mean, for me, in the Bay Area, food was largely something, or a pursuit of food was

largely something that grew out of the politics of that region, that grew out of the free speech

movement, the number of people who had either graduated from UC Berkeley or dropped out of

UC Berkeley had marched for free speech, had marched against the war,

...