An East Coaster gets his first taste of In-N-Out Burger. Photo by Michael V. Chopko

Growing up, my house was healthy. Bran stocked the cupboard, gallons of skim milk sat in the fridge. We didn't eat fast food except on rare occasions. On busy nights, my parents picked up sprout-laden sandwiches and baked potatoes from our nearest Fresher Cooker franchise. After multi-million dollar losses year after year, the locally-owned company (conceived as a healthy alternative to burger joints) filed for bankruptcy, folded, and the restaurant in the strip mall parking lot near my house fell apart and came back together as a Skyline Chili.

Fast food mainly happened on road trips then, when we'd drive from Louisville to New Orleans or Northern Florida for a vacation. I remember one drive down with my brother and dad. I must have been ten. We stopped for fries and Arch Deluxes. I had a fish sandwich. An hour later, not far from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, my brother started throwing up. He hadn't been poisoned; he was car-sick, a tendency worsened by his habit of doodling in notebooks as the Volvo heaved and pitched over I-65's pocked surface. We stopped at a gas station so my dad could clean him off and buy a styrofoam cooler. My brother was still throwing up, leaning out of the car, near the pump. A scraggly old yokel sauntered over. "What's wrong with 'im?" he asked, practically chuckling. My brother threw up into the cooler all the way to Hattiesburg. As soon as he was done, he wanted another burger. Vegetarianism dulled the allure of fast food for a while, but even in college, it permeated the culture. My senior year, I lived next to a Rax, a pitiful little lump of a franchise my friends and I always assumed was the last of its kind in the country -- so disconnected so under-patronized that perhaps -- like Edwina, the cookie-baking dinosaur -- it hadn't gotten wind of its own extinction. Then, for some people, going for fries at Rax was as palatably ironic an act as stacking toilet sculptures in the main quad or carefully growing a neat cop-style mustache to sport above a bemused smirk.

Today, I avoid fast food. I strive to eat healthily, responsibly, and well -- and I manage to get two out of three right most of the time. In other words, if I'm going to eat fried chicken, it's going to be good fried chicken -- featuring a bird whose life was reasonably pleasant prior to its sudden conclusion. However, this general rule isn't always easy to follow. Over the last five years, I have spent a lot of time touring around the country playing music -- and eating on the road in any way resembling that to which I am accustomed in San Francisco is tough if not impossible. If I were more of an urban homesteader, I'd make my own jerky, dry fruit, and roast nuts for snacks. Instead, ducking into parking lights, entranced by warm neon glows, I forage along the inter-states with wildly varying results. Thanks to a soggy half-rotten "veggie delight" foot-long somewhere in Michigan, I haven't eaten anything from Subway in three years, and I never will again. On the other hand, I have learned that Arby's makes a decent vegetable soup. Its coffee shakes are good too. I have also learned that Carl's Jr. has one healthy sandwich that doesn't make me feel sick after I eat it: the grilled chicken with barbecue sauce and crunchy lettuce on a whole wheat bun. The sauce tastes like low-cal ketchup dosed with liquid smoke, but I don't quibble. I'm always happy to see that yellow star rising up on a pole in the dark next to the highway. In general, grocery stores are better than restaurants. Whenever I stumble across a reasonably well-appointed one, I buy carrots, bananas, bread, and peanut butter, or some deli turkey and cheese. While these eats assault my body with less malice, something remains appealing about fast food on the road, particularly when it's eaten in the car, as music hums from the stereo, and the windows rattles as the wheels tumble along. Towns give way to cities, suburbs, and towns again. The windshield steams up from unwrapped burgers. A greasy smell oozes into the upholstery and hangs in the air between the front seats. Ketchup packets fall on the van floor. Someone steps on one, and he is cursed as red spits across the carpet.

On the West Coast, In-N-Out Burger -- every famous chef's favorite drive-through -- reigns supreme. My band was heading up from Los Angeles last weekend. As we approached the parking lot, the keyboardist, a Lebowski fan visiting from D.C., awoke from a two-hour nap and practically dived out of the rolling van to get his first taste. While little approaches a double-double animal-style, the Midwest and East Coast offer a few nice options you can't get out here. Wawa, a Mid-Atlantic chain of convenience stores, has excellent sandwiches you can customize via touch-screen. Frequently found in service plazas along East Coast turnpikes, the Falls Church, Virginia-based Roy Rogers has the "Gold Rush" chicken sandwich, fried breast on a roll with bacon, melted provolone, and honey barbecue sauce. The closest White Castle outpost may be 1 and 1/3 days away from us by car -- in Shakopee, Minnesota to be exact -- but you can buy frozen sliders from Walgreen's stores anywhere. I know because I have done so from the one on 24th and Potrero.

Some fast food restaurants have short menus focusing on a specific culinary theme -- fried chicken and little besides fried chicken, just burgers, or chili -- and others, like Jack in the Box, for example, try to be all things for all customers, offering tacos, egg rolls, and cheese-steaks as well as burgers and fries. In my experience, the former -- focused, quality-conscious enterprises in the vein of In-N-Out Burger -- tend to be more successful. To play with the idea, I've come up with a few unique fast food concepts -- inspired appropriately by San Francisco -- to diversify the field.

Offal promises to stay hot in the food world. Falafel is a fast food Americans outside of cities don't know or trust yet. I was thinking a restaurant serving both could be both excellent and successful. Chris Cosentino and the proprietors of Old Jerusalem would have to consult. I would call it Fal-off-All in honor of Chik-fil-A and serve lavash wraps stuffed with fried sweetbreads, kidneys, and liver.

Mini-cassoulets. Sounds a little precious for sure, but I think even road-trippers in far-flung bastions of rigidity would warm up -- especially in snowy weather. I know I would have loved to stumble across a franchise of Le Petit Confit zipping across Nebraska several Februarys ago.

This past fall, New York City Momofuku impresario David Chang ticked off a bunch of sensitive locals when he semi-drunkenly accused low-watt San Francisco chefs of "fuckin' just serving figs on a plate." He might have been taking a cue from an expat. Over the summer, former A16 and SPQR chef Nate Appleman abruptly abandoned local stardom to move to New York in search of a louder buzz. He popped up in a New York Times profile to lightly dis San Francisco diners: "In San Francisco the audience is easy. You put tripe in a bowl and tell them it's from a humanely raised cow and they're going to eat it." In honor of both famous chefs' opinions, someone should start a faux-Chez Panisse fast food restaurant serving austere mockeries of the perfect-simple-thing-in-a-bowl motif: shriveled radish slices with table salt, canned pears with a touch of low-grade honey, and gassed half-green tomatoes with "balsamic" drizzles -- all served with pseudo-artisan sourdough bread. Bowls and Rolls -- it'll be huge, I'm telling you.

"Have you tried the lamb brains?"

Well, it was just that sort of party. The lamb brains, so I was told, were simply smashing--like meaty custard, in the best possible way.

But the lamb brains weren't the half of it. The outdoor tables at last weekend's first Primal Napa event were a head-to-tail, guts-and-all celebration of going deep with meat. There were the strips of grilled beef heart, for starters, and a whole roasted Musquee de Provence squash stuffed with chunks of pork liver. Then slim slices of headcheese, unctuous slathers of nduja, much salume, even entire smoke-blackened lambs' heads, complete with jutting teeth and curled, fibrous tongues. "Yeah, just gnaw right on the jawbone," advised one chef-jacketed guy behind the table.

The setting was appropriately rustic, outside on a beautiful autumn afternoon, under the trees and up against the vines at the Chase Cellars' Hayne vineyard in Napa, with hay bales scattered and, for Napa, quite a young and stylish crowd. There was definitely money here, cool money with BMWs parked in the grass, strolling over for scoops of lamb brains and chunks of rare goat right off the bone.

Back in the hot zone, surrounded by smoking coals, piles of logs and a whole Mediterranean coastline of fresh rosemary branches was Mr. Meat himself, Incanto and Boccalone's Chris Cosentino, jogging from fire to fire in his flaming orange t-shirt emblazoned "USDA Choice," his voice worn to a rasp. In fact, all the cooks seemed to be having a swell time, getting sweaty and grimy surrounded by fire and meat.

Mopping harissa marinade over a long spitted row of feet-on chickens, nuzzling a flat of eggs into a pillow of hot ash, angling an entire spread-eagled goat (furry hooves intact) over a pile of flaming coals: the concept may have been based in subsistence cooking, but the style was deep in the smoky flair that only flambeing can bring.

The mood was definitely gleeful--meat does that to people--and in a funny way, honest. There was no getting away from the fact that eating here meant eating something that once had a face, because that face, or at least the edible bits of it--the tongue, the cheeks, even the eyeballs--were probably right there on the table next to the legs or ribs or tenderloin. And the animals had a pedigree: ask any cook, and they could tell you where the meat they were roasting came from, who raised it and how.

Elbowing up to the platter of slow-cooked pork Hudson Ranch pork belly (divine), one could eavesdrop on any number of serious discussions about heritage pig breeding. Get distracted for a few moments by the leather-and-chocolate Pinots from Hirsch Vineyards, and the roasted goat legs would be all but picked clean, although a few succulent morsels could always be chiseled off and shared by the kind woman wielding a chef's knife on the other side of the table. This wasn't down-home (the highlights and sunglasses on display were much too expensive for that) but there weren't any waiters or coddling, either. In fact, you had to do a little begging just to score a little paper plate and skimpy napkin. Some of the meat was in bite-sized slices; some was simply hacked up and plattered, letting the hungry pull through the shreds and fat with eager hands and plastic forks. We cooked it, the attitude seemed to be. You figure it out.

Up front were hands-on displays of rock-star butchering (a cross-coast trend recently chronicled in the New York Times under the headline Slaughterhouse Live) with Fatted Calf founder Taylor Boetticher whipping through a beef forequarter with deft strokes and cool aplomb. Neatly wiggling out the ball of a shoulder, he pointed out that this particular breakdown didn't require too much finesse, since all the meat was destined for sliders, a rough grind of aged meat and creamy fat made into mini-burgers for the hungry hordes. (Too true: with all the variety meats on display, the table handing out hot dogs and burgers was the one with the surging six-deep, hands-out crowd, right from the moment the patties hit the grill.)

Not surprisingly, the list of participants read like a who's who of current carnivorishness: Fatted Calf, 4505 Meats, Boccalone, Avedano's, Perbacco, Star Meats...and Ubuntu? Wait, that Ubuntu, Napa's famous yoga-studio/vegetarian restaurant, the place my vegan cousin and his new bride had a nearly religious experience over the cauliflower three ways? Thankfully, Ubuntu chef Jeremy Fox (not himself a vegetarian) joined the party to show that open fire-cooking can do wonderful things to vegetables, too. There were terra cotta pots brimming with Rancho Gordo beans in spicy broth, slippery whole roasted torpedo onions, and more.

As the sun slipped away and the strings of white lights lit up across the wine-pouring booths, the heavy hitters came out, finally ready after their hours in the hot zone, staked and salted, roasted and smoky. It was primal, and it was delicious.

Sorry, Mr. Foer. You may not eat it any more, but you know how good it can be.

Photos by Stacy Cahill