Some restaurants, rare though they are, exude a kind of palate mnemonic.  There you are, seated at a restaurant in your hometown, but something has happened in your memory, thanks to something on your palate, or perhaps the lighting, or the tables, the music in the background – and suddenly you are transported, back to that meal you most adored in the midst of your most favorite vacation when nothing was required of you but to savor what you’d been served.

Such a feeling envelops you soon after you enter Cookshop on Tenth Avenue, or rather Tenth Avenue Cookshop as its full name would have it.  Back in the nineteenth century, perhaps a more convivial time, cookshops were establishments where locals could come for a bit of simply prepared food.  The philosophy behind this current Cookshop revolves around sustainable ingredients and humanely-raised animals alongside support for local farmers and artisans.  And it’s not long after being seated at Cookshop that a feeling of contentment, the kind most associated with vacation, and perhaps specifically those spent in San Francisco, takes hold.  Perhaps it’s the bread, fresh and whole-grained and thick-crusted – or maybe it’s the spread, a heavenly combination of horseradish, caramelized onions and creme fraiche.  A glass of Cotes du Rhone and a plate of bread – sometimes it takes so little.

Then comes the heirloom tomato salad, yellow and red jewels, and also the hand-cut pasta with tomato ragout, and the vegetable succotash, with corn so fresh there must be a field out the back door—  And squash blossoms stuffed with mushrooms and—  This is food one associates with farmers’ markets, produce fresh from the earth, every flavor still accessible.  For dessert, there’s a coffee sundae, with coffee sauce and coffee ice cream, and also a buttermilk brioche beignet with a blueberry coulis so fresh—  There must be a blueberry bush out the back door too.

To eat at Cookshop is to remembering the best foods you’ve ever eaten: that peach from a summer long ago, and the best ever corn on the cob, and that slice of blueberry pie, and those fresh donuts—  All come rushing back to you at Cookshop, a cornucopia of your best-loved American meals.