At 6:30 a.m. on a bright Tuesday morning in San Francisco in May, Karley Webb crouched down in a semi-abandoned lot. She was there to collect New Zealand spinach, one of a dozen wild edible plants and herbs a chef in Menlo Park had tasked her with collecting. As Ocean Beach roared below, she harvested the wild green — unrelated to common spinach, it grows in sandy soil — leaf by leaf.
“Right now it’s kind of easy, because there’s stuff everywhere,” said Webb, dressed in knee-stained overalls and a pink ball cap embroidered with a golden chanterelle. “Everywhere you look there’s mustard and roses and radish.” But that springtime abundance could also make chefs more demanding, she said, ticking off the long list of elderflower, nasturtium, baby sun rose, wood oxalis, honeysuckle and other herbs and flowers that Nico Russell of Café Vivant had requested.
Webb, 34, is a bounty hunter for tiny wild things that Bay Area fine dining chefs love to use as garnishes. The delicate blossoms add color and luxury, creating miniature landscapes that evoke coastal California on the plate. She documents her days on Instagram, holding up each haul at different time stamps, often starting before 7 a.m. with an enthusiastic, “Let’s go foraging!”
Some days she hikes 4 miles to a favorite fuchsia bush for Nisei in San Francisco, a Michelin-starred kaiseki restaurant that fills the bell-shaped magenta flowers with salmon roe. She braves poison oak, ticks and reptiles — a garter snake bit her in the face once while she waded through watercress. But the work pays the rent, at around $1 dollar per fuchsia and $15 per quart of radish flowers. “Even if I wasn’t making money, I’d probably still be doing it,” she said. “It’s just so cool that you can eat things. You can find things and eat them yourself. I’ve been obsessed with that my whole life.”…