There's Art And Poetry On The Plates At San Francisco's Atelier Crenn

The Hi-Lo Food Show features acclaimed chef Erik Anderson (a Food & Wine Best New Chef, founding chef of Nashville's The Catbird Seat, and chef-owner of the forthcoming Brut in Minneapolis) along with me, the editor-in-chief of this website and a semi-professional eater. Here's the simple concept: We visit a city and eat at two restaurants, one very expensive and one very cheap, but each highly recommended by professionals and our local friends. We'll speak to the high-end chefs about their cuisine and vision, and we'll talk to each other about the food. (That'll be mostly me asking Erik questions.) For this first series, we visited three cities: Chicago gave us high-end wonderland El Ideas and Polish sausage emporium Jim's Original, while Charleston delighted our taste buds with McCrady's and Nana's. This week, it's San Francisco, that beautiful, contradictory city. For the high end, we visited the relatively new Atelier Crenn, the two-Michelin-starred restaurant of chef Dominique Crenn. Crenn grew up in France, but her culinary training has taken her all around the world, and those influences show. She also had the added benefit of parents who loved good food, and who inspired her to be relentlessly creative—her menus, as you'll see, are delivered in the form of a poem. Tomorrow, we'll head to a long-running Vietnamese spot.