“This is a good vintage.” He scooped a handful of soil and let it run through his fingers. It fell in loose clumps, a dark brown shade, and landed back in the rough burlap bag on the floor. “It looks fantastic. That color is so rich, so deep.” He licked the few remaining moist flecks from his fingers. “Delicious.”

I was standing in a dining room that would not have looked out of place alongside the highest temples of haute cuisine in New York City. Geophagia opened last week alongside the San Francisco waterfront, and the proprietor and head chef, George Godson, was showing me around in the morning, as bags of soil and dirt arrived on trucks from around the world.

“As a culinary people, we’ve collectively lost contact with how our food is grown, where it comes from. You walk down the street and tell people that carrots grow underground, and they look at you like you’ve shit in their coffee.” The new restaurant is Godson’s way of reminding people that food comes from the earth. “Our ancestors were raised on food that had dirt on it. Dirt’s good for you. It’s got vitamins, minerals.”

Good, clean dirt, that is. Godson works with suppliers around the world to have specially-irradiated dirt brought specifically to his restaurant. “All the harmful microbes have been scrubbed out of this soil. It’s fine to eat.” The Food and Drug Administration has issued a tentative statement about the concept of dirt-eating, saying, in part, that “soil is not a proper source of nutritional value, and should not be a replacement for actual food in a normal diet. However, soil that has been properly treated would likely not be harmful in small quantities.”

Godson isn’t waiting for bureaucratic approval to start serving paying customers dirt-covered food. “About three-quarters of the menu is standard fare, with soil provided as a side-dish, as a way to enhance the flavor and texture of the meal itself. It’s like wine in that way, in that pairing it is of extreme importance.” The soil from Napa, for example, is good when paired with braised chicken breasts. A blend of soils from China do well alongside veal. “It’s all about pairing.”

The other quarter of dishes are “made with soil as the main ingredient, or central flavor or texture.” The purest of the dishes in this category that Geophagia serves are the ‘mud cookies’, which are simple patties of dirt with just enough water to make them solid enough to eat. “They’re a last-resort food in disaster-hit places like Haiti after the earthquake, where food is impossible to come by, and people are desperate to fill their stomachs with anything at all,” Godson explains. “By offering them here, in the lap of luxury, I want people to think about what the differences in context that take it from a diversionary meal to a staple of a diet.”

I sample a slightly less outré menu item, the braised duck with sea cucumber, with an extremely fine sand from the beach near where the sea cucumber was fished in Alaska on the side. While the dish itself was executed very well, the sand introduced an extra layer of complexity into the proceedings. I tried it both separately and with the meat, and found that, while alone, the sand was simply too gritty to be at all enjoyable, adding it to the dish as I ate, as if it were just another condiment, changed the texture and made it altogether more interesting, the roughness waking up my tongue to better taste the other ingredients.

Opening night was a big hit, Godson reports, with the line of the adventurous eaters backed up throughout the evening. Time will tell if he can turn this momentary curiosity into a sustainable business venture.