There are few food writers as talented as Seattle Weekly's Jonathan Kauffman, and I was sorry to read the announcement today that he's blowing out of town, heading back where he came from: San Francisco.

In a brief post on Voracious, Kauffman wrote:

I'm both sad and excited to announce that on January 1, 2010, I will be moving back to San Francisco to become the restaurant critic for the SF Weekly. For the past three and a half years, I've had the privilege of writing about food in Seattle at a time when this city's restaurant scene is exploding. Covering everything from the Korean suburbs to the newest crop of artisanal butchers has been a blast, and I'm sad to leave a paper that I think is producing some of the sharpest, most interesting writing in Seattle. At the same time, I'm excited to return to San Francisco. Not only is it another one of the nation's best restaurant cities, it's the place where I learned to cook, where I ordered my first bowl of pho, where I ate my first bowl of octopus-shrimp cocktail off the side of a taco truck in a grim Oakland parking lot. My roots there run deep.

Meanwhile, as his Seattle fans weep, the folks at SF Weekly are ordering Cantonese seafood in his honor. John Birdsall, editor at Voracious' sister-blog SFoodie, posted the news in San Francisco minutes after Kauffman pushed the "send" key on his preliminary farewell post.