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Sons & Daughters Chefs, El Paseo’s Preston Clark Among Chron’s Rising Stars

This year's class, minus Matt McNamara, whose wife just had a baby.
This year’s class, minus Matt McNamara, whose wife just had a baby. Photo: Russell Yip/Chron

Well, it’s another all-male Rising Star class … The Chron released their twentieth annual list of local up-and-comers on Sunday, and as usual they try to reach beyond San Francisco proper and recognize budding talents at noteworthy restaurants — though once again they could not come up anyone female who made the grade. Locanda’s Anthony Strong gets a nod after years working the ovens at Pizzeria Delfina and almost a year after opening Delfina’s Roman spinoff. Also among the honorees is Preston Clark, the former New York chef who Tyler Florence brought in to helm El Paseo in Mill Valley. Interestingly, neither chef garnered more than two and a half stars when Bauer reviewed them last year, so they may have been kind of surprised by the honor.

Now Amanda Gold writes of Clark — whose father was the late Patrick Clark, opening chef at Odeon in New York — that “he’s able to showcase the best of what Northern California has to offer, in simple, straightforward dishes” at El Paseo, working alongside Florence daily.

Paolo Lucchesi tells Strong’s story, which began in Minneapolis and continued with a seven-year tenure in the Delfina mini-empire. (Bauer had previously reviewed Strong’s food and called it “rustic and well executed.”)

Also among the honorees are widely lauded Sons & Daughters chefs Teague Moriarty and Matt McNamara, to whom Bauer bestowed three stars in an update review last year, just prior to their getting their first Michelin star.

And Brett Cooper, the former Saison and Coi chef who now has the helm at Outerlands — a buzz-worthy restaurant Mr. Bauer has blogged about recently but not yet reviewed — also gets a nod.

Rounding out the group is 26-year-old Joey Elenterio who took over the kitchen at Mountain View’s Chez TJ last year, and who went to California Culinary Academy straight out of high school and got his first job at the shuttered Spago in Palo Alto.

Congrats, boys.

Finding Talented Chefs for 20 Years [Chron]
Earlier: Ubuntu Chef Aaron London Was Once Under House-Arrest, and Other Revelations From the 2011 Chron Rising Stars
Bauer Denies Tyler Florence the Three-Star Prize In His New Review of El Paseo
Bauer Calls Locanda ‘a Winner,’ But Says It Doesn’t Compare to Delfina

* This post has been corrected to show chef Preston Clark’s name correctly as Clark, and not Brown. We know too many Prestons.

Sons & Daughters Chefs, El Paseo’s Preston Clark Among