By Paul Reidinger

Jefferson thought the Constitution ought to expire every 19 years or thereabouts, so that the political choices of one generation did not bind or oppress the generations to follow.

"I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self-evident: 'That the earth belongs in usufruct to the living'; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it," he wrote to James Madison in 1789. "We seem not to have perceived that by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation to another."

Jefferson's notion of regular constitutional revision – "a medicine necessary for the sound health of government" – never caught on, and in light of that missed chance, we might well wonder about the sound health of our present government, which seems to have done everything in its power to destroy or abandon the Constitution altogether. But certainly the idea that it's important to consult first principles from time to time is one of timeless vitality and relevance, and not only in matters of politics. Jefferson, as it happens, was a polymath and Francophile, a politician and winemaker, an innovative farmer and – most odd for a public figure – a recluse; so far as I know, he did not write about restaurants, but if he had, he doubtless would have wanted to have clearly in mind the purpose of the endeavor, its fundamental assumptions and its audience.

Audience: a baffling phenomenon. Readers of these columns are, for the most part, as abstract to me as I am to them. Every now and then an angry brick is flung through the window (I speak metaphorically, of course, since such bricks consist now of e-mail or, much less frequently, a handwritten note, sometimes a phone call), or a reader will offer a helpful tip about some place recently opened or closed, but for the most part there is just the whistle and whine of the heedless wind. Like interstellar probes, the words are prepared and launched and, with rare exceptions, not heard from again. They may reach hundreds or thousands or no one; there is no way to know for sure. And so one presses on – in part from professional obligation, of course, and from habit, but also for more personal reasons having to do with the belief that the tale of what we eat and drink and how we eat and drink it is an important chapter of the human story and that telling it well (accurately, memorably, in fresh language free of cliché) is a worthy undertaking: a minor and derivative art but an art nonetheless, touched by the fire of meaning and beauty and an enrichment to the lives it touches.

Is that absurdly grand: grandiose? Part of the fascination of writing about food is the impossibility of it. Eating is, after all, a primal, sensual experience that, like sex (a similar experience often invoked as a comparison), has a way of eluding capture in even the most finely woven net of text; writing about what it was like to eat X or fool around with Y, or both simultaneously, does not begin to capture what those experiences felt like. The writer's arsenal is limited to suggestions, hints, jokes, puns, similes, metaphors, improbable similarities, contrasts, paradoxes, juxtapositions, and such mots justes as can be summoned to give some sense of the vividness of biting into a merguez sausage or tasting a blood-orange crème caramel or.... Sensual experience is often overwhelming experience, and the writer's fondest, perhaps only, hope in dealing with it is to strike some chord of memory in the reader so the reader can supply, from a private store of recollection, that elemental energy no combination of words can capture.

Luckily, restaurants aren't just about food: They are public arenas too, stages for the enactment of elaborately costumed little dramas about romance and status, money and race, age and looks. They are noisy and calm, beautiful and homely, pretentious and un-, as are the people who haunt them. People, we the people, are creatures of the word: We declare and rejoin, we ask and assert, we offer witticisms and ripostes and the occasional gaffe. As talkers we are capturable in words – what we say, what we do, what we think – and we are never so loquacious, so self-revealing, so useful to a writer (who is after all a kind of spy), as when breaking bread with someone else, perhaps after having had a glass of wine or two. In vino veritas, teaches the old saw, but in panis veritas too, and ... but no, I will leave that one to your imagination. The most important human truths are usually revealed through the agency of food and wine (and beer! and spirits!), and that tendency alone suggests that when we are writing about food and drink, and the places food is eaten and drink drunk, and by whom, we are in serious territory and should comport ourselves accordingly, though not humorlessly.

Like all previous years with which I am personally acquainted, 2005 has been a mixed bag: no lack of difficulties, occasional spikes of glory. I was sorry to see Johnny Alamilla's Alma go; the place had opened in September 2001 – a dicey moment – and was possibly the best spot of its nuevo Latino kind in town. Tartare closed too, but this was hardly surprising. I did not weep for the passing of the mediocre Spiazzino; I was saddened by the disappearance of Essence of India and cautiously optimistic about the openings of Range and Maverick, lodestars of the new Mission. Peruvian vogue accelerated and even reached 24th Street in Noe Valley, while "fusion" cuisines continued their expansion. I noticed a wealth of new restaurants serving "Mediterranean" food, which means the food of the eastern Mediterranean: hummus, baba ghanoush, grilled lamb, yogurt, lemon, cilantro. But so far only Saha has adopted these foods to a fusion ethic. Still good: Rose Pistola, La Folie, Zuni, Acquerello – all proof that while revision and renewal are crucial, so is constancy.

A young friend complained to me recently about restaurant prices, especially in the Mission, where he lives.

"I don't mind if places are nice," he said, "but does that mean the food has to cost $20 a plate?"

Ah. I often asked myself that question in 1999, then asked it less often after 2001, when the great correction had set in. But circles close; booms become busts become booms again, and it doesn't always take 19 years for a new generation to assert itself.