Zuni Cafe chef Judy Rodgers dead at 57

Judy Rodgers' genius as a cook was finding the perfection in the simplest dishes. And at her Zuni Cafe in San Francisco, diners would reserve months in advance to eat roast chicken.

The longtime chef at the iconic Bay Area restaurant died Monday. She was 57 and had been battling cancer. Her death was confirmed by her husband, Kirk Russell.

Rodgers was an integral part of a wave of young chefs who remade the culinary world in the 1970s and 1980s, inventing what has come to be called "California cuisine." She took over the kitchen at Zuni Cafe on a run-down stretch of Market Street in 1987, quickly turning what had been a passably popular Southwestern-themed cafe into one of the defining restaurants of her generation.

Under Rodgers, Zuni was named the best restaurant in America in 2003 by the James Beard Foundation. And in 2004, she was named the country's outstanding chef by the same organization. (The other nominees that year included such well-known names as Mario Batali, Nobu Matsuhisa and Tom Colicchio.) Her "Zuni Cafe Cookbook" was named cookbook of the year in 2003 by the Beard Foundation.

In an era when most chefs pride themselves on reinventing their menus on a whim, Rodgers hewed to a strong central core of well-loved dishes. Perhaps the best loved of these is a simple roast chicken, cooked in a wood-fired oven. On the menu for decades, more than 350 a week are sold at Zuni.