A cookbook, showpiece and memoir — all in one

“RESTAURANT DOCTOR” Faith Wheeler, a longtime neighborhood resident, is touring the country with her beautiful and spirited new book — and, like the author herself, it’s a winner.

She acknowledges that Chickens Don’t Fly is “a puzzling name for a coffee table book, cookbook with few chicken recipes, or even a memoir,” but says she means the book to be all three. “The name Chickens Don’t Fly is clear to me: a metaphor for living courageously.”

“I’ve done amazing things with courage as my compass,” she says, crediting her courage with taking her from New York City to Nashville, Tokyo, Mexico and San Francisco, where she lived for years on Bush Street, near Fillmore, and with her husband raised two daughters. There are sections with recipes from her time in each of those places, plus Napa Valley and, of course, Paris.

This is a book full of stories and recipes from Wheeler’s travels and her years as a consultant to some of San Francisco’s top restaurants, including Bix and Slanted Door. It’s a good read with majestic photographs, whether or not you travel or cook. It is not a book by a shy person, lacking in confidence, uncertain of her choices. You may very well come away thinking you could have taken more chances in your own life and pursued your passions — and you might see that you still can. Especially if you like to eat.

“No matter where I have lived or traveled, I have always taken a deep interest in the local cuisine,” Wheeler writes. “Cooking has been the throughline of all of my travels, my trusty companion, motivating me to experience and learn, develop and fine-tune.”

In her earliest days in Manhattan she was a child who ate everything. The book includes a recipe for Mrs. Popper’s Raspberry Butter Tarts she wheedled from her mom’s friend when she was in third grade, which “may have been the subconscious genesis of my entire food career.” As teens she and her brother took over the family cooking duties. “Did you know,” she writes, “that a stainless steel Revere Ware pot could actually melt? Neither did I.” For her 16th birthday, she chose the legendary Lutèce, the storied temple of la cuisine française.

Then she went south for college at Vanderbilt. “Arriving in Nashville as a northerner in the ’70s was a bit like entering a foreign country,” she writes. “It was quite the culture shock. Yankees were sort of viewed as immigrants.”

She learned to eat pulled pork, fried chicken, okra, cheese grits and Goo Goo Clusters. “Wow, was I eclectic!” she writes. Soon enough she had a “darling friend” from Indianola, Mississippi, who taught her to speak and cook Southern style, including grilled cheese, wrapped in foil, toasted under an iron. She calls it “a trick I still use occasionally, just for the ‘huh?’ appeal.” Bourbon became a food group. From this period she shares recipes for Sorority Girl Egg Casserole, My Winning College Chili and Red Velvet Cupcakes.

Four years later, diploma in hand, she cried as she left Nashville and headed home to New York. “Mom was right,” she writes. “People were people, and I had grown to love this place.”

That’s just the beginning, before she discovers San Francisco. The rest of the book is equally engaging — maybe more so — and filled with dozens and dozens of recipes and page after page of seductive photography by Clay McLachlan that equals the finest food porn.

Faith Wheeler’s Chickens Don’t Fly is available at Hudson Grace at 3350 Sacramento Street and online.

EXCERPTS

‘San Francisco opened its arms to me’

By FAITH WHEELER

With a full tank of gas in my little green Rabbit and an adventurous friend who had never seen the country, I threw my remaining furniture on the side of 93rd and 1st in NYC and took off at 5 a.m. with a sign on my bumper, “California or Bust.”

After spending the night under the Bozeman stars, we hit the road early, landing in my new “City by the Bay” on May 17, 1987. As costumed creatures and half-naked men in Wizard of Oz outfits surrounded the car, I was caught completely off guard, until realizing it was the same day as the Bay to Breakers footrace. Still in my Ronald Reagan-era togs — brass button, double-breasted suits, pearls and sweater sets — I wondered: what the heck had I done? It is quizzical to pack up your entire life for no apparent reason and leave your perfectly wonderfully familiar one to arrive 3000 miles away without a job and nary a friend. But I have always thrived on courage.

San Francisco opened its arms to me, on contact. The moment I plugged in my curly-wired Princess phone, it rang! It was Jim, a boy in the restaurant business with many East Coast connections — and equally food obsessed — inviting me to a party. The party that didn’t cease,

Exploring the inner reaches of town: goat stew at La Rondalla, perfect martinis at the Persian Aub Zam Zam Room, cioppino at Alioto’s, steak tartare at Taxi. And cooking with Jim, who eventually tipped me off to a position at his company, Spectrum Foods. Spectrum had an impressive portfolio that included MacArthur Park, Ciao, Prego, Tutto Bene, Tutto Mare, Chianti + Cucina, Harry’s American Grill and Guaymas. A marketing director for a $60 million, 16 unit, white tablecloth restaurant company with honestly zero experience in the restaurant business except as a dedicated consumer? The dream job!

What I lacked in experience I compensated for in endless hours, and the company prospered under my watchful eye. Rewriting menus, developing marketing plans, testing recipes, running the advertising and PR, monthly tastings, dining out with editors every night. I was the happiest little workaholic this side of the Mississippi. I would have stayed there forever had I not gotten married and then pregnant. With a new sheriff in town, I knew the rigorous schedule would be tough, so I started my own restaurant consulting company. It didn’t take long to have a long list of clients and become known as the preeminent “restaurant doctor” of San Francisco.

— Excerpted from Chickens Don’t Fly by Faith Wheeler