Eat American!

"Welcome to America!" What sounds like the official greeting at a U.S. international airport is in fact the standard hello to customers at one of New York City's newest, largest and most successful café-restaurants, called America. In a larger sense, that greeting is equally appropriate for style-conscious eaters who formerly restricted their gastronomic forays to France, where they devoted vacation times to seeking out the specialties of superstar chefs like Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard and the Troisgros brothers. Now with equal zeal, many such adventurers are beginning to tour the U.S., eager to sample the highly publicized culinary creations that make up the new American cuisine.

As the restaurant becomes the new American theater, and the young, the well-off and the restless may eat out five or six nights a week (see following story), their itinerary not only includes the fashionable eateries of their hometown but follows a trendy trail from coast to coast. "With affluence, your palate becomes very important to you," observes Jonathan Waxman, the chef who brought California cooking to New York in his popular though wildly expensive restaurant, Jams. Chefs sought by such traveling gastronomes are likely to include Alice Waters (Chez Panisse, Berkeley), Paul Prudhomme (K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, New Orleans), Larry Forgione (An American Place and the new Morgans Bar, New York), Richard Irving (the Ivy, Los Angeles) and Jeremiah Tower (Stars, San Francisco, and Santa Fe Bar & Grill, Berkeley).

Anyone considering such a trip could find no better season than this, for with its dedication to lightness and freshness and its celebration of vegetables, herbs and fruits, the new American cooking shows to best advantage in late summer. From now through October, the colorful bounty of local farms will present a dazzling challenge to these inventive chefs.

"We're sort of going crazy in the kitchen to keep up with greens that will be interesting and new and delightful to the eye," says Anne Rosenzweig, the chef and partner at the small and sophisticated Arcadia, one of the best new wave restaurants in Manhattan. "I'm doing roast quail on beet greens," she says proudly. Rosenzweig reports that out-of-town visitors compare dishes they have had in Par is to those she created, adding, "They do tours of New York restaurants or the California wine country."

One wine-country stop that beguiles many people is the relaxed, pleasantly bucolic New Boonville Restaurant, about 2½ hours northwest of San Francisco. The restaurant appeals both to stylish celebrities like Angela Lansbury and casually dressed locals. Charlene and Vernon Rollins, the husband and wife who run this restaurant, grow most of their own produce in a sprawling garden on their grounds. It is now a shimmer of color with orange peppers, green to red tomatoes, emerald zucchini and rose-gold peaches. The Rollinses raise much of their own poultry and serve most meats and fish simply grilled. Their delectable goat cheese and bacon pizza (the best dish sampled at a recent Sunday lunch) looks like a mille-fleurs embroidery, decked out with tomatoes, Swiss chard, orange squash blossoms and flowering purple sage.