NYTimes.com reports, “Breakfast meetings, perhaps, are best suited to Hollywood types, people who pitch and spin even before the first coffee. When I found myself in San Francisco early this month along with Nancy Silverton, the esteemed founder of La Brea Bakery and the restaurant Campanile in Los Angeles, the only time we could get together was for breakfast. Ms. Silverton, who now owns two of Los Angeles’s most popular restaurants, Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza, with Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, has just published her eighth book, “The Mozza Cookbook” (Alfred A. Knopf, $35), and she suggested Boulettes Larder, in the Ferry Building.”

“Ms. Silverton, 57, arrived dressed in black like a New Yorker, wearing Jackie O shades, even though she is San Fernando Valley born and bred. She is a small woman, sporting a knot of wiry hair on top of her head, and her body has a tensile quality, like a human rubber band. The physical work of a baker requires agility and stamina and a bent toward stubbornness, or perfectionism, and even behind the Foster Grants that attitude slammed through. She’s a cool girl, if not quite a tough girl, and when members of the restaurant staff recognized her, they surrounded her like a team of white blood cells.”