California Through the Foam: Jonathan Kauffman Checks Out Sons and Daughters

aL Z./Yelp

Foam party: Sons and Daughters' porcini noodles with teensy turnips.

​Tired of the same old dichotomy that places Northern California's farm-to-table cuisine far form the glossy geometry of so-called molecular gastronomy? So are we. So is Jonathan Kauffman. In today's "Eat" column, SF Weekly's food critic finds two young chefs using the tricks of the latter to burnish the pleasures of the former. Kauffman rolls into two-month-old Sons and Daughters, where Teague Moriarty and Matt McNamara harness foams and powders to make the dewy harvest of farm-centric ingredients even dewier. Kauffman:

They are two guys in their 20s with cooking-school hubris and modest résumés -- stints as private chefs, European internships, Moriarty's sous-chef position at Grégoire in Berkeley -- yet their cooking has a polish many long-timers never achieve. Like most chefs working in this vein, they've taught themselves about techniques like spherification (putting a liquid into round shapes) and sous-vide (cooking at low temperatures in vacuum-sealed bags) by studying cookbooks from restaurants like Alinea and the Fat Duck and by befriending the staff from Le Sanctuaire, the nearby molecular-gastronomy supply store.

Read the review. Then scroll through Kauffman's extra-credit Q and A with chefs Matt McNamara and Teague Moriarty.