Yesterday I had lunch with chef Scott Howard, who after five years overseeing the well-regarded restaurant Fork in San Anselmo, California, is on the verge of opening his own restaurant in San Francisco. Scott was in New York doing a tour of restaurants in the name of research (my kind of fact-finding mission), I had been trying to track him down for a piece I’m doing for Gourmet on the “rising star” chefs who took part in this year’s annual Citymeals-on-Wheels event and he was one of the few I had yet to make contact with. We agreed to meet at the Spice Market, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s theme-park of a restaurant in the Meat Packing District.

I enjoyed meeting Scott; he was modest (especially for a fellow naming a restaurant after himself) and polite, exhibiting none of the sense of entitlement I have encountered in some up-and-coming chefs. But the real treat was his companion, the semi-legendary Cecilia Chiang, who opened the Mandarin restauant in SF in the sixties and has given lessons in Chinese cooking to Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl and Jeremiah Tower. Cecilia is both an investor and a consultant in Scott Howard (the restaurant, not the man) and as someone who has outlived both Trader Vic and Herb Caen, two of her original champions, she is a trove of SF restaurant lore.

Cecilia is in her eighties now though I would have pegged her for 70 in both looks and energy. We talked about the Yuet Lee, at Broadway and Stockton, where I used to dine after midnight back in my cab driving days. I told her I was there one night when the restaurant’s original chef caught someone who tried to dine-and-dash and beat him with a baseball bat. That was nothing, she said. She was there the night a Chinese gang member came in and killed the cook for his outstanding gambling debts. (This was late, too, after the Mandarin had closed for the night. “When you are running a restaurant you never have time to eat,” she said.) She also recalled Masa, the Japanese chef who took SF by storm in the eighties. He was killed, too — stabbed a hundred times with an ice-pick — also supposedly for owing money to the wrong people. The lesson, kids: Don’t cook and gamble!

For the record, neither chef thought much of the Spice Market’s fare, though both admired the road-to-Mandalay decor. Only one appetizer, an egg roll stuffed with mushrooms, stood out and the service was downright indifferent — strange, given that I had told the maitre d’ I was meeting some food luminaries for lunch. But Cecelia has seen it all in her time; as a child she endured the Japanese occupation during WWII and then fled, with her family, when Mao and his boys took over in 1949. Some relatives who remained were killed in the Cultural Revolution. What’s a watery ice tea compared to the Red Guard?