It's a development that Morgan, who worked at both Sunset and Better Homes and Gardens prior to joining the Chronicle editorial staff last year, hopes to reflect throughout the section. As for home design, Cooper and Morgan point out that, especially in the food-centric Bay Area, "the kitchen is always the most popular room in the house." They also discovered that readers were less interested in the previous section's emphasis on sweeping photos of gorgeous--but mostly unattainable--showplace houses, and much more eager to get real-life advice and stylish design solutions for more typical (and often space-challenged) Bay Area homes, bungalows, and apartments.

Over the past few months, Cooper and Morgan have been on a "listening tour" to hear what readers want. They realized that, to be relevant in today's very interactive media climate, the paper could no longer be simply the "voice from on high" coming from the Chronicle's imposing block of offices on Mission Street. While the paper still has the benefit of fact-checkers, copy editors, and recipe-testers to assure the accuracy of everything from a pudding recipe to a report of a restaurant's closing, Cooper and Morgan hope to make readers' opinions, photographs, and finds into one of the paper's shareable assets.

Some things won't change, however; Michael Bauer, the paper's longtime restaurant critic, will continue to write the weekly lead restaurant review, and high-profile wine writer Jon Bonné will lead the wine coverage. The annual much-debated, much-awaited Top 100 Restaurants list will also go on. But Morgan and Cooper plan to emphasize quality writing and a diversity of voices within the section. Alongside Bauer's two-and-a-half star review of Archetype in St. Helena is Jonathan Kauffman's two-and-a-half page exploration of Lazy Bear, an underground restaurant that's poised to go legit in the Mission this summer. Kauffman describes its previous off-the-radar incarnation as "the highest-rated, least-known restaurant in the Bay Area," run by David Barzelay, who went from laid-off lawyer (fresh out of law school, he'd been employed for less than a year when the post-2008 financial crisis knocked out his job) to obsessively self-taught, molecular gastronomy-inspired cook. Kauffman, an IACP and James Beard Award-winning writer who previously worked as a reviewer and editor at SF Weekly and Tasting Table, joined the paper's staff in April.

The section will feature fewer recipes than before; with so much recipe content now available online, readers are much less inclined to depend on torn-out newspaper columns for stovetop inspiration. Still, the Chronicle's clout still counts. Notes Cooper, "We can call up pretty much any chef in the Bay Area and they'll talk to us." So the recipe sections--the season-driven Fresh Now and the technique-focused In the Kitchen--will take advantage of the paper's broad access to the pros.

With all this to offer (plus ice cream), the new section seems poised to fill its niche better and more widely than before. Which didn't stop Eater from gleefully dancing on the grave of the food section as we've known it. Food and Wine is dead, it's true; long live--or as long as any print newspaper might live in these digital times--Food+Home.

David BarzelayDavid Barzelay

SF Chronicle Launches New Food+Home Section