Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco-based writer who specializes in restaurants and food culture. He was the restaurant critic at the East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, and SF Weekly, as well as the San Francisco editor at Tasting Table, before joining the San Francisco Chronicle as a staff writer.
His restaurant reviews and reporting on food issues — avian flu, pig slaughter classes, shark-fin bans — have won numerous awards.
The latest tech boom, as most people know, has had innumerable and sometimes extreme effects on life in the Bay Area: Rents are skyrocketing, longtime businesses are being pushed out, and the character of the city is changing. All of these factors…
As of October 2015, the Chronicle’s food section has given me control of a column, “Forager,” which appears three weeks out of four. My mandate at the paper is to cover the intersection of food and culture — a broad task — and so “Forager”…
In the midst of tracking down the origins of brewers’ yeast and baking numerous loaves of whole wheat bread, I have also written a few articles: Rainbow Grocery Turns 40 (SF Chronicle). San Francisco’s largest collectively owned worker enterprise, as…
I’m thrilled to announce that William Morrow has agreed to publish my book, Hippie Food: How Longhairs, Revolutionaries and Back-to-the-Landers Changed the Way We Eat. I have spent the past 15 years exploring the intersection of food and culture, from regional Chinese specialties newly appearing in…
January 2015 was my month to pontificate. For the January 31 episode of KCRW’s Good Food, Evan Kleiman interviewed me about meal-sharing websites, underground dinners for the Uber age. (You can read my November 2014 article on the phenomenon here.) I also drank beer and talked…
Though nondairy cheeses have a 100-year-long history in the United States, up until the present, most have have been rubbery and tasteless. My recent feature for the Chronicle profiles a new generation of artisanal vegan cheesemakers, inspired by Bay Area cookbook author Miyoko…
For its February 2014 issue, San Francisco magazine asked John Birdsall and me to spend two months chronicling the state of Mexican food in the Bay Area. This was no burrito roundup: We covered family-style restaurants primarily serving the Mexican American…
After two months of research, several hundreds of miles and many, many dishes, I wrote the cover story in the February 2013 issue of San Francisco magazine. Titled “The Great Noodle Quest,” it lists what may be — or, at least,…
I have a new article out in the Chinatown issue of Lucky Peach magazine, which came out in early November. Titled “Pro Choys,” it looks at Chinatown’s produce markets and traces the vegetables back through the supply chain to the…
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