A lot of ink has been spilled over Zuni Cafe, the iconic San Francisco restaurant that has been a bastion of California cuisine since it opened in 1979. Almost everything written about the restaurant shoehorns in a mention of the roasted chicken with bread salad for two, a dish that the late chef Judy Rodgers added to the menu almost 30 years ago. Customers and reviewers alike love its unadorned simplicity — juicy roasted chicken with a burnished, crispy skin perched on top of a warm salad of toasted bread and seasonal greens doused in a tangy vinaigrette. But if you crack open the Zuni Cafe Cookbook and try to replicate the restaurant’s most famous dish, you’ll find a decidedly not-so-simple recipe and possibly a kitchen full of smoke.

I had my first Zuni Cafe chicken on a visit to the Bay Area in 2004, when an old college friend suggested I meet her and her new boyfriend at the restaurant. She was eager for me to meet him, as she was pretty sure he might be “the one.” I was impressed that he’d nabbed us a table — Zuni had recently been named Outstanding Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation. He was also startlingly handsome (a doppelganger for a young Will Smith), charming as all get out, and gainfully employed as a lawyer. Over aperitifs at the crowded zinc bar, I decided that I liked the guy. Then we sat down to eat.

We ordered a bunch of starters to keep us busy while we waited the hour for our chicken to be blasted in Zuni’s famed wood-fire oven. When the chicken arrived, it was exactly as I had heard it would be: crackling skin, succulent meat, all set atop a colorful salad. After we served ourselves, I watched in disbelief as the boyfriend removed the skin from his portion of chicken and cast it aside onto his unused bread plate. He also declined to touch the bread salad. I tried to concentrate on the conversation but all I could hear was the line from the Caddyshack golf club dinner scene where Judge Smails’s uncouth nephew turns to the woman on his left and asks, “Are you gonna eat your fat?”

I managed to keep that to myself, distracted as I was by the perfect chicken and otherwise charming company. The chicken was such a triumph that I bought the Zuni Cafe cookbook that night. Later, my friend texted me to ask if I liked her new love interest. “No,” I replied. “He’s no fun.”

I’ve been making the Zuni chicken salad recipe ever since that experience, but I’ve made several tweaks over the years. Frankly, cooking from the recipe, all four-and-a-half pages of it, is a pain. It’s written in tiny print with lots of unbroken text and starts with a long head note that goes over Rodgers’s philosophy about getting the right sort of chicken (it must weigh under 3 ½ pounds, and you must also know the bird’s name, provenance, and diet). Good luck finding a chicken that small, even at upscale organic markets; and regular grocery store birds often weigh around 6 pounds. I’ve adapted my recipe for the more common smallish 3 ¾- to 4-pound range.

Once you’ve got the right sort of chicken, you wash it (though I wouldn’t), dry-brine it, and stuff herbs under the skin of both the breast and the outer thighs, though I’ve never been able to achieve the latter without tearing the skin. Torn skin shrinks as it cooks and leads to exposed meat that dries out in a hot oven. The chicken is then loosely covered and left to cure in the fridge for one to three days to brine and dry out the skin.

Roasting the bird is its own challenge. You’ll be high-heat roasting the bird in a 475-degree (or 450 or 500) oven, depending on how the recipe worked out the last time you made it and whether the chicken “browned properly,” the efficiency of your oven, the size of your bird, and the pan you used. The inexactitude is baffling, especially if you’ve never roasted poultry at such a high temperature, which a lot of people haven’t.

Rodgers also failed to mention that high-heat roasting a chicken will fill your home with thick, greasy smoke. It doesn’t matter how clean your oven is, how powerful your oven hood, or how wide you open your windows. I’m here to tell you from experience that if you follow this recipe as written, smoke will follow. You’ll also need to flip the hot chicken not one but three times to make sure that the juices wind up where they’re supposed to and the skin is the right sort of crispy. Flipping a bird is tricky and requires strong hands good at handling heavy tongs, or you risk melting chicken fat running down your arms and tearing the crackly skin you’ve worked so hard for. Ask me how I know these things, I have scars.

While the chicken roasts, you’ll be working on the salad. You broil bread chunks and tear them into pieces; make a vinaigrette with champagne vinegar; soak currants in another kind of vinegar, gently warm (not brown) a few tablespoons of pine nuts in a baking dish; saute garlic and green onions in yet another pan; and then faff about dressing the bread with vinaigrette and then again with broth or salted water and tasting it many times, covering it, putting in the oven, taking it out of the oven, dressing it again, and warming a serving platter. It’s the kind of recipe you must read and reread multiple times, while your sink fills with dishes.

Weirdly, the bread salad gets more detailed finishing instructions than the doneness of the chicken does. Rodgers assumes you know how to determine whether your chicken is cooked perfectly, because she gives you only vague time ranges and doesn’t tell you how to test whether the meat is safely cooked. She also writes that the chicken will “become more tender and uniformly succulent” as it rests but doesn’t tell you how long to rest it, or how to cut up the whole, steaming-hot bird for serving. (Spoiler: It’s a mess if you’re not a pro butcher.)

After years of flipping those stained pages back and forth while periodically running to reset my blaring smoke alarm with a broom handle, I’ve come up with a better way to have my Zuni Cafe-inspired crispy chicken skin and eat it, too.

First, I spatchcock the bird. Removing the backbone produces one flat surface of meat so everything cooks more evenly. This also eliminates the need to flip the chicken, as everything comes out crisp and juicy at the same time. I do dry-brine my chicken with herbs under the skin and let it sit uncovered in the fridge for a day. If space is an issue and you’re worried about the chicken coming in contact with other things in the fridge, you can cover it loosely. I recommend using a sheet of parchment instead of plastic wrap (which traps moisture, the opposite of what you’re after).

To cut down on the smoke from a high-heat roast, I put a layer of thick potato slabs at the bottom of the pan. They absorb the fat melting off the chicken, thereby reducing the smoke. As a bonus, this gives me delicious schmaltzy spuds, a lovely side dish to a roast chicken if ever there was one.

I carefully temp the chicken with an instant-read thermometer at the thigh and in the meaty part of the breast, pulling out the bird when the breast registers 155 degrees. (There will be carryover cooking.) It’s good to check early, since a spatchcocked bird can be done in as little as 35 minutes.

Next, I use the hot pan to saute the green onions and garlic, plump the currants, and add the vinegar, all while releasing all the flavorful chicken gunk stuck to the pan. I add a bit of low-sodium chicken broth to the pan, too, because you need a fair amount of moisture to dress the bread salad. A quick toss with some sturdy greens and the salad is done in seconds.

I rest the chicken on a cutting board set in a sheet pan (to catch the juices should they meander off the cutting board) for 15 minutes. It’s easier to cut up a spatchcocked chicken: Just separate the legs from the breast, cut them into thigh and drumstick portions, and cut the chicken breast in half crosswise right through the bone and you’re done. Plop the chicken and any juices from the cutting board on top of the salad and you’ve got a delicious California cuisine-type main dish salad with plenty of crispy skin and a heck of a lot less fuss — and almost zero smoke — all in about an hour.

Incidentally, the love affair between my friend and her boyfriend didn’t work out nearly as well. She broke up with him about a year after our dinner, describing him to me as “a real stick-in-the-mud killjoy kind of guy.” I can’t say I was surprised: Show me how a man dines, and I’ll tell you whether he’s good dating material.

Zuni Cafe Roast Chicken Recipe

Adapted from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 small (3½- to 4-pound) chicken
2 teaspoons sea salt, plus more for seasoning salad
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
6 to 8 (2-inch) sprigs fresh thyme, rosemary, or sage (or a mix of all three)
8 ounces rustic bread, bottom crust cut off, cut into 4 large chunks
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
8 ounces Yukon gold potatoes, cut into 1-inch-thick rounds
3 green onions, thinly sliced
3 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon dried currants
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
¼ cup homemade or low sodium chicken broth
3 cups seasonal greens such as frisee, arugula, or radicchio, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons pine nuts, toasted (optional)

Instructions:

Step 1: Put the chicken on a cutting board with the backbone facing you. Use poultry shears or a boning knife to cut along either side of the backbone, remove, and reserve for another use (such as making broth). Place the chicken skin side up on the cutting board and push down firmly on the breastbone with your palm to flatten the chicken out (you should hear a faint crack). Tuck the wings behind the back. Pat dry thoroughly with paper towels.

Step 2: Combine the salt and pepper in a small bowl. Slide your fingers carefully under the skin of the breast and shove a few pinches of the salt mixture and herbs beneath it and in the pocket between the thigh and the breast. Rub the remaining salt mixture all over the chicken. Refrigerate uncovered on a rimmed baking sheet or plate for 24 to 48 hours. (Make sure it stays away from other food in the fridge, so it doesn’t get cross contaminated.)

Step 3: Remove the chicken from the refrigerator at least 30 minutes before roasting to take the chill off it while you preheat the oven. Place an oven rack in the bottom third of the oven. Put a large (12-inch) oven-proof skillet in the oven and set it to 475 degrees.

Step 4: While the oven preheats, put the bread in the skillet and toast it, turning once, until it is golden brown in places and crisp, 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer the bread to a cutting board, wipe any crumbs out of the skillet, and return the pan to the oven. Tear or cut the bread into large bite-size pieces and place in a large bowl. Set aside.

Step 5: When the oven is up to temperature, toss the potatoes with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil and place them in the hot skillet. Put the chicken skin side up on top of the potatoes, arranging the legs towards each other (the end of the drumsticks should just touch). Roast until an instant-read thermometer registers 155 degrees in the thickest part of the breast (about 170 degrees in the thigh), 35 to 45 minutes, depending on the size of the chicken. If you have a convection setting in your oven, turn it on for the last 5 minutes of cooking for an extra crispy skin.

Step 6: Remove the skillet from the oven. Transfer the chicken to a cutting board set in a baking sheet and let it stand uncovered for 15 minutes. Scoop the potatoes out of the skillet into a serving dish, cover with foil, and set aside in a warm place.

Step 7: Place the skillet on the stove over medium heat. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil, green onions, garlic, and currants and cook, stirring constantly, until they soften and become fragrant but not browned, 1 minute. Add the vinegar and broth. Increase heat to medium-high and simmer, scraping up the browned bits on the bottom of the skillet, until the mixture is reduced to about ½ cup. Keep the sauce warm over low heat until ready to serve.

Step 8: Cut the legs away from the body of the chicken and cut them into drumstick and thigh pieces at the joint. Cut the breast meat in half crosswise through the bone with a sharp chef’s knife. Pour any accumulated juices into the skillet to mix with the sauce.

Step 9: Pour the sauce over the bread, then add the greens and pine nuts and toss to coat everything. Season to taste with salt and pepper, keeping in mind that the chicken is fairly salty on its own. Mound the salad on a serving platter and top with the chicken. Serve immediately with the potatoes on the side.

Ivy Manning is a Portland, Oregon-based award-winning food writer and author of 10 cookbooks, including Tacos A to Z: A Delicious Guide to Nontraditional Tacos. She is a regular recipe tester and editor for Eater as well as for restaurants and appliance brands.

Dina Ávila is a photographer living in Portland, Oregon.