The architectural towers of trendy restaurant food may not have collapsed yet, but they're crumbling. A wave of enthusiasm for simpler food threatens to take them down any day now as diners rediscover the pleasures of perfect ingredients left alone. Home cooks, too, seem to be tiring of kick-it-up-a-notch cooking and are investing in the foundation ingredients—sea salt, extra-virgin olive oil, home-grown herbs—that make it possible to turn an heirloom tomato into a statement.

Of course, no one has been more influential in defending simplicity than Alice Waters, founder of the landmark Berkeley, CA, restaurant Chez Panisse, who has never wavered in trumpeting ingredients over technique. But other powerful spokespeople for the simple kitchen are joining the chorus, among them the influential California food writer Viana La Place. In an earlier work, Unplugged Kitchen (William Morrow), La Place urged her audience to jettison their food processors and get their hands on the food. Her latest book, My Italian Garden (Broadway Books), hits similar themes: The food you grow—or buy at a farmers' market—needs little embellishment to taste great.

La Place finds inspiration for her simplicity credo at farmers' markets in Italy, "where people are looking not for how to combine what they're buying with other ingredients, but for what's in season, what's going to taste the best," she says. "That's the guiding principle, that something can taste good without your having to turn yourself into a pretzel making it."



Certainly the explosion of farmers' markets in this country in recent years has made simple cooking a lot more compelling. Who would have dared make a lettuce soup—a recipe from My Italian Garden—a generation ago, when iceberg was the only lettuce at the grocer's? But with the full-flavored, just-picked greens from a farmers' market, a soup of wilted lettuce, garlic-rubbed bread, olive oil and Parmigiano-Reggiano makes a strong case for less-is-more cooking.

High-end restaurant chefs need to manipulate their pristine products because they can't charge a lot for minimalist dishes their customers know they can make at home. These chefs traffic in imagination, tricky technique, the hard-to-get. But whether their mile-high creations with microgreens deliver as much satisfaction as the pared-down dishes of a simplicity haven like San Francisco's Zuni Café, where a bowl of polenta with mascarpone is a menu fixture—well, at least that discussion is finally underway. Soon enough, a perfectly ripe peach may rival the tours de force of the nation's three-star chefs. —Janet Fletcher

My Italian Garden Viana La Place Broadway Books More than 125 seasonal recipes from a garden inspired by Italy.