I’m a writer, editor, public speaker, and former cook. For nearly a decade, I worked as the lieutenant to the late author, TV host and producer Anthony Bourdain.

I’ve written for the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Rolling Stone, Saveur, Bloomberg, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others. In 1996, I earned my bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, after which I moved to New York and completed the professional training program at the French Culinary Institute, where chef-instructor Pascal Béric gave me the single best piece of advice I’ve ever received: “Don’t freak out! Freaking out is not gonna help.”

I worked as Mario Batali’s assistant from 1999 to 2002, during which time I contributed to the writing of his books Holiday Food (2000) and The Babbo Cookbook (2002). I edited and recipe-tested Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook (2004), and then spent several years as an editor, at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. 

In 2016, Ecco (an imprint of HarperCollins) published Appetites: A Cookbook, which I co-authored with Anthony Bourdain. Our second collaboration, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, was published by Ecco in April 2021, and hit the New York Times bestseller list at #1. In September 2021, Ecco published Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at #7. Appetites, World Travel and Bourdain have each been translated into more than a dozen languages.

I recently co-authored, with Richard Hart, the James Beard Award-winning Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking, published by Clarkson Potter in November 2024. My memoir, Care and Feeding, was published by Ecco in March 2025, and debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at #8. I co-host a food-focused podcast, Carbface for Radio, and am a writer for Flaming Hydra, a creator-owned newsletter collective. I’m currently working on a Basque-Spanish cookbook with chef Ryan Bartlow, and ghostwriting a memoir for a star of the beverage world.