Smoked by AI · San Francisco · people

Cesar Hernandez

Critic · Journalist — Bay Area restaurants with a real East Bay weighting, plus the citywide category sweeps: the best coffee, the food halls, the bars.

Listed with the critics and writers in San Francisco.

Cesar Hernandez covers the Bay Area's food scene as a restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. He won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for food and restaurant journalism in 2025, and he was part of the L.A. Taco team that won the James Beard Foundation's Emerging Voice Award in 2020. He is the second of the two critics behind the paper's ranked Top 100 Restaurants in the Bay Area, and his own account of the method is that the team appraised every restaurant on its own terms, which let them set a fine dining room beside a deli.

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Nothing here yet where they gave a verdict of their own — anything below is coverage they wrote, not an endorsement.