The word “authentic” has been overused by food writers as a catchall term of praise for just about anything that tastes good, especially when somebody’s grandmother is hovering somewhere in the recipe’s back story. But the word springs from the same root as the word “author,” and the food I recognize as authentic is real food that is unmistakeably its creators’ own, as unfakeable as a manuscript in its author’s own handwriting. Such food is rare, so when I first saw the handmade fruit tarts and loaves of bread from Liz Pruitt’s and Chad Robertson’s wood-fired brick oven I did an excited double-take. This was nearly ten years ago, after Liz and Chad, had started their tiny Bay Village Bakery in Point Reyes Station in Marin County. Twice a week they hauled their bread to the Berkeley farmers’ market in big eye-catching vintage wooden boxes, and before long Berkeley shoppers were queuing up for bread before the market had even opened. The bread was that good. It had that remarkable village-bakery quality that comes from organically grown stone-ground flour, native yeasts, coarse gray sea salt, a wood fire, and loving hands. Call it authenticity. I went to see the bakery soon after. It was in a little Victorian cottage, and the brick oven was in a fifteen-foot-square kitchen in the back of the house where Chad baked as much as there was room for. At the time I was summering in the fog of Bolinas, a seaside village not far from Point Reyes Station, reading a wonderful memoir by a French chef named Henri Charpentier, Life à la Henri. I was so caught up in Charpentier’s vivid descriptions of his apprenticeship in the kitchens and markets of France almost a hundred years ago that I couldn’t help drawing negative comparisons between the food of then and now. But I made an immediate exception for Liz and Chad’s bakery: I remember thinking that their little tarts and rustic loaves would have been right at home in Henri’s world—a world where freshness was measured in hours rather than days or weeks and where honest food was grown and prepared by human hands: a world that, even in France, has largely disappeared. The Japanese designer Eiko visited me in Bolinas that same summer, and because I wanted to surprise her with something unexpected and beautiful—no easy task, Eiko having one of the more exacting and exquisite esthetic sensibilities I’ve ever encountered—I took her to the bakery one afternoon. Liz was stacking boxes of apricot tarts to take to market; I remember the sun was streaming down and the apricots were glistening, their edges just slightly caramelized, and Eiko was ravished. The whole magic tableau said everything that needs to be said about food and the joy of living. I’ve never been much of a baker or pastrycook myself, and whenever family birthdays rolled around, I came to entrust Liz and Chad with baking the cake, one of which in particular floats into my mind’s eye (and onto my mind’s palate) as a kind of Platonic ideal of a birthday cake: I remember layers of airy cake separated by thinner layers of strawberry jam; a rose geranium-flavored red wine syrup; just enough perfectly whipped cream; and arranged around the glazed top, little sprigs of just-picked fraises des bois, the fragile, intensely aromatic European woodland strawberries, which are rarely grown in California gardens. A cake so classically restrained in appearance and so impetuously romantic in flavor is the finest birthday present I can imagine receiving. More birthdays have raced by, and today Liz and Chad are the proud proprietors of the bustling San Francisco establishment that gives this book its name. On the surface, Tartine may appear to be the urban antithesis of the bucolic Bay Village Bakery. It’s not just that the bakery is several times larger than their old one; Tartine is also a neighborhood café in a cosmopolitan neighborhood densely populated with the young, the restless, and the ambitiously hip. Yet Liz and Chad have preserved their quiet artisanal authority without making any esthetic compromises. The desserts at Tartine are full of light and air, at the same time. The bakery is lavish in the use of seasonal fruit, judicious in its deployment of sugar and decoration, and, best of all, nearly all their ingredients are grown nearby and produced sustainably, so that everything that comes out of the kitchens is fresh, unfussy, simple, and alive. In short, Tartine is about as authentic—and as indispensable—as a bakery and café can get. No wonder people are still lining up.