Big family gatherings centered around Southern food were a big part of chef Celtin Hendrickson-Jones’s childhood in Sacramento. His Alabamian grandmother would have everyone over for dinner and cook the foods she remembered from back home. So when it came time for Hendrickson-Jones to lead his own restaurant, he immediately drew on that nostalgia. Enter: Prelude in SF.
“There’s not a lot of Southern food in San Francisco,” Hendrickson-Jones says. “It is something that I can connect to personally, so I feel more passionate about cooking it for a living,”
The restaurant is part of a steadily growing wave of Southern restaurants in the Bay Area, including the San Francisco outpost of Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement on Fillmore and Oakland’s Burdell, which was named Food & Wine’s restaurant of the year.
At Prelude, Hendrickson-Jones (an alum of two-MICHELIN-Starred Commis) has teamed up with a host of fine-dining vets from places like SingleThread and Angler San Francisco. He is marrying the recipes of his grandmother with California ingredients and his fine-dining chops at a restaurant that’s unlike any other in the city.
Read on for what that means at Prelude in SF, and make a booking on OpenTable.
What to eat
The menu is made up of small and large plates, and every entree comes with a bowl of grits to be shared by the table. “That’s something that is a cornerstone of this restaurant,” Hendrickson-Jones says. “My grandma would make grits with a lot of meals, and we enjoyed it every time we went over to her place.”
He recommends going for proteins like the grilled pork chop or the roasted duck breast and adding on smaller dishes like the catfish dumplings that come in a buttery étouffée gravy and the dirty rice-stuffed chicken wings, a mash-up of a Southern staple and Southeast Asian-style wings.
There are a lot of exciting developments on the horizon. Soon there will be carts roving through the dining room making cocktails and ice cream sundaes tableside. “This might be fine dining, but ice cream sundaes are fun no matter how old you are, and I think we should be able to have fun in restaurants,” Hendrickson-Jones says. Prelude will also introduce a tasting-menu option soon. “There will be some different, fun dishes you wouldn’t find on the normal menu,” Hendrickson-Jones says.
What to drink
Beverage director and Angler San Francisco alum Franco Bilbaeno leans into the Southern spotlight with the cocktails, too. Hendrickson-Jones is partial to the P.F.C. Martini with a buttermilk-washed vodka, some pickle brine, and a dash of chile oil. “It’s like Nashville hot chicken, but in martini form,” he says. “It’s super savory, a little bit spicy, and it makes you want to eat and drink more.”
Saison Hospitality alum and master sommelier Morgan Harris has created a stellar wine list in collaboration with the popular Maison Healdsburg team. Expect a bottle list that focuses on Napa, France, and Italy, along with vintage Champagnes. “I think when we start the tasting menu—that’s when the wines are really going to shine,” Hendrickson-Jones says.
Where to sit
Famed design firm AvroKo evokes the Presidio in the interiors, so you’ll see lots of sage green to nod to the Eucalyptus trees and light fixtures that are meant to look like Eucalyptus seed pods. The dining room is full of spacious banquettes, while the sleek bar is done up in light wood and marble. “You feel like you are in someone’s living room or den,” Hendrickson-Jones says. “It’s a beautifully designed room, but we don’t want that to limit us in terms of being stuffy. We are still in San Francisco, after all, so we want people to come as they are.”
Tanay Warerkar is a content marketing manager at OpenTable, where he oversees features content and stays on top of the hottest trends and developments in the restaurant industry. He brings years of experience as a food editor and reporter having worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, Eater, and the New York Daily News, to name a few.
