San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic and James Beard Foundation member Michael Bauer joins KGO as host of “At The Table”. Airing each Thursday, Bauer will offer his exclusive insight on the vast culinary offerings of the San Francisco Bay Area, including the established, the new, the cutting edge and the controversial.

Bauer is the executive food and wine editor and restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, overseeing the largest food and wine staff on any newspaper in the United States. Bauer grew up in the food business, working at his father’s meat market while also studying for an undergraduate degree in journalism and a master’s degree in mental health and mass communications at Kansas State University.

He began his journalism career as a feature writer specializing in behavioral sciences at the Kansas City Star, where he eventually switched to food reporting. He then went to the Dallas Times Herald as the restaurant critic and wine editor before coming to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1986. Bauer is a past president of the Association of Food Journalists, a current member of the James Beard Foundation Restaurant Awards Committee and a 2004 inductee into the Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America.

For more from Michael, check out Inside Scoop SF.

To hear the At The Table podcast, click here.