![]() Happily, for Webber and his patrons, his senses of smell and taste are back to normal. I guess I was relearning what things smelled like." "Things didn't smell like they did before. Then suddenly, nine months after the attack, he walked into a coffee shop and smelled the coffee. He could taste spicy food a little and acidic tastes came through. "I thought, 'I'll have to give up my career,' because as a chef, I would always be dependent on someone else." He put it up to his nose and smelled nothing he tried many times, without success. "I had two concussions."Ī couple of weeks later, Webber took his first walk and idly picked a branch of rosemary. ![]() "Mike needed 28 staples to put his head back together - it was split open like a cracked egg," Webber says. Webber was in intensive care, had neurosurgery and was in the hospital for four days Robertson was released that night. They staggered a few doors to Robertson's apartment, and the sous chef's girlfriend (now his wife) drove them to San Francisco General Hospital. The next thing Webber remembers is waking up in a pool of blood. As they left, some youths who had been in the bar attacked them for no apparent reason. After work one evening two years ago, he and his sous chef, Mike Robertson, stopped for a beer at an upper Clement Street bar. Midway through our meal, Webber gets into the details of how he lost his senses of smell and taste. The second dish is in many ways the star of the evening: clouds of fluffy egg white with paper-thin slices of fresh abalone. Every element is flavored in a different marinade or light sauce, delivering a rainbow of flavors and textures. Our first dish appears: six little hillocks of ingredients, the best being tender, thin-sliced lotus root in a sweet marinade, another the sweet tendrils of jellyfish. It is no wonder that some of the delights he has created at Cafe Kati bridge Europe and Asia, such as his Vietnamese spring roll stuffed with mango instead of meat and seafood, and his seared Peking duck with huckleberry essence. Webber's love of Asian food and culture came from his San Francisco base and the couple's many trips to Asia. Right about the time Tina and Kirk married, they opened Cafe Kati, their signature restaurant in the Fillmore district. Now divorced, they share custody of their 12-year-old son, Tim. On a plane, he met Tina, the Chinese American woman who would become his wife almost eight years later. While we wait for the first dishes to arrive, Webber tells me he was born in Southern California, bounced around cooking in eight or nine places, from hospitals to all-you-can-eat restaurants, and eventually came to San Francisco to study cooking at the California Culinary Academy. Since he opened three years ago, chef Nei' has hired a dishwasher and a couple of servers - he used to do everything himself. The room is simple, decorated with a hodgepodge of Christmas lights, an illuminated scene of a waterfall and various and sundry tchotchkes. Each dish is about a cupful, or several bites. Diners choose what they want to spend, from $35 to $75 per person.įor our dinner, we decide on the $45-a-person repast, which turns out to be eight to 10 small plates. In a small, brightly lit storefront on a dark part of Pacific Avenue, chef Nei' Chia Ji presents a tasting menu that is refined and groundbreaking. Since Webber is one of the few chefs who does fusion cuisine well, I wasn't surprised when he chose the unique Chinese restaurant Jai Yun for our interview.
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