About
I'm a writer and journalist, author of twelve non-fiction books on different subjects, including wooden boats and pediatric heart surgery. But my main work has been writing about food and the work of professional cooking—three books on the life and work of the chef and four cookbooks written with some of the country's best chefs. I also write occasional stories for The New York Times, Gourmet Magazine, Food Arts and other publications. My most recent book is The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen (November 2007), a culinary reference on fundamental cooking terms and ideas.
The facts: Born in Cleveland in 1963. Graduated from Duke University in 1985. I was copyboy at the The New York Times from 1985-87 and an editor at Northern Ohio Live Magazine from 1991-93. All other years I’ve been writing on my own. I live in Cleveland with my wife Donna, a photographer, and my two kids.
How did I get here? While grateful for my opportunity at The Times, it showed me that daily journalism was not the way I wanted to spend my life writing. I left before two years had passed to pursue a desultory life of travel, writing, and odd jobs, returning to Cleveland in 1991. Here I found work as an editor at a local magazine that covered Cleveland's cultural scene, for which I wrote an article about the man who had become headmaster of my high school, a private boys' school. This article lead to my first book, Boys Themselves (1996).
(Right) My kitchen: when I'm not writing or reporting, this is where I spend a lot of my time.
A committed cook since fourth grade, I proposed to the Culinary Institute of America, the oldest and most influential professional cooking school in the country, that I be allowed into its kitchen classrooms in order to write a narrative of how the school trains professional chefs. The school agreed, and I wrote The Making of a Chef (1997).
I became so fascinated by the work of the professional cook and the culture of the restaurant kitchen that I continued to pursue the work, punching a clock briefly as a line cook, then writing a book about chefs and cooking, The Soul of a Chef (2000). I co-wrote The French Laundry Cookbook (1999) with Thomas Keller at the same time, and he and I subsequently wrote a food column for the Los Angeles Times for two years.
(Above) Tony Bourdain lured me to Vegas for his show No Reservations; ever image conscious, he was infuriated by my Cleveland pallor and insisted I do something about it before we hit town. Photo by Nari Kye,courtesy of The Travel Channel, L.L.C.
In February 1999, I moved with my family to Martha’s Vineyard to research and report on life at a yard making plank-on-frame boats for the book Wooden Boats: In Pursuit of the Perfect Craft at an American Boatyard (2001). In October 2000, I began work at the Cleveland Clinic’s Children’s Hospital for the book Walk on Water (2003, it remains the book of which I’m most proud). I wrote it concurrently with A Return to Cooking (2002), with Eric Ripert, chef-owner of Le Bernardin, the Manhattan four-star restaurant.
Other books include House: A Memoir, about the purchase and renovation of a 1901 house in Cleveland and an exploration of the nature of home in our vagabond culture, and The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooks in the Age of Celebrity. Other cookbooks include Bouchon, written with Keller and the others from the French Laundry Cookbook team, about French comfort food, as well as Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing – a thinly veiled love song to the pig, to animal fat and salt, sausages, confits, pates, terrines. Another cookbook with the Thomas Keller team on cooking sous vide will be published in 2008.
I have been on several television shows, "Cooking Under Fire" on PBS, and, on the Food Network, I was a judge on the "Next Iron Chef," appear occasionally as a judge on "Iron Chef America," and have been a featured guest on the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain’s "No Reservations," Las Vegas and Cleveland episodes.
(Right) Judgment in the Next Iron Chef competition in Munich. From left, Bernd Schmitt, myself, restaurateur Donatella Arpaia, editor Andrew Knowlton, and host, Alton Brown interrogate San Francisco chef Chris Cosentino. Photo courtesy of The Food Network