Green salad tossers

Mounds of hypocrisy, served with a heaping helping of nuance:

NOBODY goes out to dinner in the San Francisco Bay Area to eat food flown in from Europe. Right here is the spiritual center of the Eat Local movement, which has persuasively argued the political, environmental, ethical and culinary benefits of cooking with local ingredients and supporting local agriculture.

San Francisco is also in the heart of the California wine country, with Napa and Sonoma to the north, and the Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey wine regions to the south. Restaurants here that so prominently credit their local food purveyors on their menus no doubt feature local wines loudly and proudly, right?

Not quite. A surprising number of Bay Area restaurants, including many dedicated to cooking with local ingredients, offer wine lists dominated by European bottles.

What gives? Is this hypocrisy pure and simple?

"We recognize that it's a tricky thing, and it's a little hypocritical, but we also recognize there's a certain style and authenticity that you can't get anywhere else," said Chris Deegan, the wine director at Nopa, a popular restaurant north of the Golden Gate panhandle. Nopa's Web site declares, "We serve simple food created with seasonal ingredients sourced from local purveyors," but its wine list is overwhelmingly European.

Funny how the allowed foibles of our green authoritarian betters are merely giggled away as a certain joie de vivre. For those unallowed foibles which other individuals may enjoy, a one-way ticket to Folsom.