For California Mexican, a new vision

DOnA TOMAS is not a restaurant name that rings many bells outside the San Francisco Bay Area. The owners, Thomas Schnetz and Dona Savitsky, have never been on the cover of Food & Wine, competed on "Iron Chef" or even cooked at the James Beard House. Google them and mostly what you will find are references to their new cookbook, named after their first restaurant, in Oakland.

In a food culture that seems to worship celebrity above creativity, it says everything that their book is a knockout on every level, not least because a vicarious eater will get as much out of it as will a dedicated cook.

Unlike the average perfunctory compilation of restaurant recipes, what the two business partners have produced is one of the most appealing Mexican cookbooks ever published and one of the best in any category all year.

You can instantly conjure the melon salad seasoned with chile powder, kosher salt and fresh mint and drizzled with pungent \o7crema\f7, the Mexican answer to creme fraiche, but you have to taste it to believe it. Ditto the very simple, sublimely silky corn pudding, or the \o7queso fundido\f7, translated into Californian with goat cheese and blanketed with a classically complex sauce of pumpkin seeds and tomatillos with three herbs.

The subtitle of "Dona Tomas: Discovering Authentic Mexican Cooking," from Ten Speed Press ($29.95), is slightly misleading. This is authentic California Mexican cooking. Schnetz says he takes what he tastes in Mexico City, Oaxaca and Guadalajara during his yearly trips and translates it using local ingredients and twists, always with the goal of elevating an undervalued cuisine. "We try to be a step beyond what's out there," he said.

A literary kickoff

THE book's dreamily meandering foreword is by the very lyrical Mexican American writer Richard Rodriguez, who happens to be Schnetz's uncle, and it speaks volumes.

"Dona Tomas is Cal-Mex of a sort we have never tasted. It rejects the blandness of California Mexican cooking, but also the greasy bathos of it. Dona Tomas belongs to the nouvelle California initiative for the pure and the good." The inspiration for the \o7queso fundido\f7, after all, was the Alice Waters signature at Chez Panisse, warm goat cheese, Schnetz says.

Schnetz, who is half-Mexican and grew up eating his Guadalajaran grandmother's tortillas and refried beans, met Savitsky while both were cooking at Square One in San Francisco. They opened Dona Tomas in 1999 after she had been the chef at Cafe Marimba and he had started a cafe in Sacramento with his brother, among other stops on their resumes.