When David Page and Barbara Shinn drove from San Francisco to New York some years ago, they collected antique American cookbooks and an assortment of home-cooking pamphlets from across the country. And when they opened Home on Greenwich Village's Cornelia Street in 1993, they filled the front window of their warm, comfortable little restaurant with their treasures--a nice touch for a place steeped in the culinary traditions of the country. A quote by our own James Beard served as the inspiration for the restaurant's name. "American food," Beard once wrote, "is anything you eat at home." And that's what Page and Shinn serve at Home; at their take-out shop, Home Away From Home; and at their latest venture, Drovers Tap Room: the best dishes from the heart-land--comfort food that our nation can be proud of--only much, much better. This month, they'll showcase the best of our American foodways, lightly dressed with their own savvy style, at a special heirloom dinner.

Page acquired his penchant for home-spun cooking while he was growing up in Wisconsin, but he has refined it by years of training in some of the best restaurants on the West Coast, including Masa's, Cafe Americain, and Postrio. In 1990 Page and Shinn moved to New York, where he ran the stoves at Country Club while she worked the front of the house at Savoy. Home, their first solo venture, was an immediate hit with New Yorkers who longed for the Page­Shinn brand of soul-warming but sophisticated fare. Just two weeks after opening, Page earned kudos from Gael Greene for his "remarkably pleasing" food, and garnered a glowing review in Gourmet. Won over by a wholly satisfying blue cheese fondue, Sarah Verdone of Paper couldn't help but notice that "the food here is a lot more interesting than what I've had at home."

Speaking of interesting, are American vegetables less interesting than they used to be? The answer, sadly, is a resounding yes. Most American produce today is grown more for its durability, good looks, and disease resistance than for its flavor. But with the rediscovery of heirloom vegetables, a steadily growing number of cooks, gourmets, and gardeners are enjoying flavors that had almost entirely disappeared from American tables. William Woys Weaver, the guest speaker at this evening's dinner, is largely responsible for the revival of heirloom vegetables. Weaver, author of the encyclopedic Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, cultivates more than 250 varieties of heirloom vegetables in his garden and offers many of his antique seed varieties to others through the Seed Savers Exchange. At this dinner, you're sure to "eat your vegetables!" with pleasure.