While I will grudgingly dice a rib or two to make a mirepoix, I otherwise steer well clear of celery. And since discovering that Suzanne Goin, as revealed in her cookbook Sunday Suppers at Lucques, sometimes substitutes fennel for celery in a mirepoix, I have happily abandoned celery and its ribs all together.

Recently at a restaurant in Portland, the kind that only has two seatings a night and serves a six-course fixed menu, I was faced with an escarole salad that had celery in it. Maybe, I thought, escarole has some magical property that makes celery taste good.

It doesn’t.

So I ate the rest of the salad and left a neat pile of celery on the side of my plate. A perfectly logical course of action, except in the eyes of my fellow diners.

“You’re not eating your celery,” said G.

“I don’t like celery,” I said.

“How could you not like celery?” asked C.

And then we were off, discussing all the foods I didn’t like. The part that bothered me was that G. had been the one to point it out. Picky eaters should stick together, and he’s a much pickier eater than I am. (I should say here that G. has come a long, long way and is not nearly the picky eater he once was. But still.) He doesn’t like beans. He doesn’t like tomatoes. He doesn’t like vegetables as a category. The next night, when we were served chili with beans in it at a Halloween dinner party, did I point out that G. was picking all the beans out of his chili? No.

But then it occurred to me that G. had not only not had my back at dinner the night before, he had been the first to stick the knife—or celery stalk—in.

“You’re not eating your beans,” I said.

All heads at the table swiveled in his direction.

“You don’t like beans? How could you not like beans?”

But $75 is nothing to sneeze at, either, so I loaded up on the nondrowsy cold medicine and trotted down to the Ferry Building to meet my friend M.

It turns out that a hall full of delicious treats (chicken liver pate, fried salt cod tater-tot-like things, spinach ravioli with a quail egg inside, pasties with homemade HP sauce, Hawaiian-style sushi, the list goes on and on) and liquid refreshments is a lot like nondrowsy cold medicine. You suddenly feel so much better and anything seems possible. Later, when the taste wears off and the mix of animal fat, bread, and alcohol is sitting kind of heavy in your stomach, you might not feel so great, but at the time, it’s amazing.

The highlight of the evening, though, was one of the few things I didn’t try. The reception was as crowded as the Ferry Building on a Saturday morning and it was getting a little tricky to navigate the tables. We stopped at a table so mobbed that we couldn’t read the menu card that said what they were serving.

“What’s this one?” M. asked.

My view was partially blocked by a woman with long brown hair leaning over the table to get up close and personal with the appetizer on offer.

“Seared local something.” That was all I could read.

“That describes everything here,” M. said.

I got a little closer to the table. The seared local something was yellowtail, topped by a tasty, salted pig part. While there’s definitely an abundance of locally salted tasty pig parts, who knew there was local yellowtail?

I was about to pick up one of the morsels when the woman with long brown hair bolted up from her forensic investigation of the appetizer.

“I think I got some of the tasty pig parts in my hair,” she said.

Which just about sums up the dangers of dining in San Francisco.

It was freezing. In classic Norcal fashion, we showed up in sunshine and spent the first hour keeping an anxious eye on the fog bank looming on the horizon. Take a sip of wine, nibble on halibut ceviche, glance to the west, shiver, sip, repeat.

The farm tour diverted our attention. Who can worry about fog when a rancher is saving a newborn piglet from being crushed by its mother? Any dinner that starts out with potential piglet infanticide is worth enduring some fog and wind.

It didn’t get really cold until we sat down to eat. If you go to one of these dinners, don’t linger too long taking pictures at the pig barn. By the time we made it to the table, there were only two seats left at the far end. A party of seven celebrating a birthday, however, insisted on sitting together, and the staff put up another table for them.

I witnessed some discreet eye-rolling and muttering by the staff about demands and entitlement. On one hand, when you ask for another table to be set up just for your party, you should ask nicely. On the other hand, people who pay $200 apiece to eat outside at a pig ranch tend to be an entitled, demanding bunch. Who are these people? Hedge fund managers, young men trying to rustle up investors for solar power, and their wives and girlfriends. Demands for extra attention and exceptions are just another day at the office for people working at such an event.

The sun went down and the wind picked up. You might think that for $200, there would be heat lamps. What are you, an over-entitled hedge fund manager? Instead the staff handed out blankets. We wrapped ourselves in musty quilts, Disney princess blankets, and teddy bear prints and ate like kings (or hedge fund managers). Warm rabbit salad with asparagus, peanuts, and lime; pork-quinoa stew with fava beans; grilled lamb shoulder with chard and turnips; and a rhubarb crostata for dessert.

At one point the wind blew so hard that it knocked a wine glass over, spilling Dutton-Goldfield pinot noir all over the people sitting opposite me. We suffered for our luxury.

This, I thought, is exactly what a refugee camp for hedge fund managers would look like.