Following the messy departure last month of Osteria Elisir's chef de cuisine and general manager, the modernist-minded Enzo Fargione has found his next kitchen leader in an unexpected place: the downtown location of Chef Geoff's, part of the family-friendly American chain owned by Geoff Tracy.

Tom Crenshaw, a Midwesterner who served as executive chef at Chef Geoff's, will now become chef de cuisine at Osteria Elisir. Fargione acknowledges that Crenshaw is an unconventional choice in that the new hire is not deeply rooted in regional Italian cuisine, which Fargione occasionally manipulated into modernist works of art at the original Elisir (which later morphed into the more informal Osteria).

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Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com