In 2013 Judy Rodgers, the 57-year-old chef of Zuni Café in San Francisco, yielded at last to the rare appendix cancer she’d struggled with for more than a year.
The many published tributes to Ms. Rodgers celebrated the urgent beauty in her deceptively simple dishes: the way Zuni’s roast chicken, house-cured anchovies and Caesar salad were woven into memories of perfect meals.
Lost to memory — and missing from most obituaries — was the name of Zuni’s founder, Billy West, the man who had coaxed Ms. Rodgers into the kitchen in 1987 after years of trying.
Though the cooking still owes a highly visible debt to Ms. Rodgers, Zuni’s pioneering queer activism is Mr. West’s forgotten legacy.