Culinary Advisory Board
Paul Bartolotta
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Steve Petusevsky |
Jesse Ziff Cool |
Nikki Rose |
Cynthia Daddona |
Lorna Sass |
Ishan Gurdal |
Michele Scicolone |
Steven Jenkins |
David Shalleck |
Agalia Kremezi |
Ana Sortun |
Susan Loomis |
Jesse Ziff Cool |
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Jesse’s work has expanded from her local community, to a national and international audience. She has traveled around the globe connecting to local farmers, shop keepers and families’ embracing what is local, sustainable and to what connects us. Jesse has been the creative force behind five unique restaurants and the author of six books as well as numerous articles. She is a much sought after spokesperson, speaker, teacher and presenter. Jesse spends her free time in her community garden, with her family, children and grandchildren. |
Jesse has been dedicated to sustainable agriculture and cuisine for more than 30 years. By supporting local food production and farmers, those she warmly refers to as her heroes and the first real environmental pioneers, her work in the food business, supports her politics and philosophy.
Cynthia Daddona |
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She is also the author of the top selling book “Diary of A Modern Goddess®”, a lighthearted wellness guide to creating a life that nurtures your body, mind and soul. Cynthia is a passionate Mediterranean home cook who loves creating and sampling recipes and atmospheres that nurture loving relationships and wonderful memories around the table. In her blog Romancing the Table™, she enjoys sharing with others her American-Italian Greek heritage and combined passions for delicious, healthy Mediterranean cuisine set in an ambience that celebrates life, love and food. Cynthia’s travels have taken her to the Caribbean, the UK, Greece, Italy, France, Spain and Morocco. While she has enjoyed sampling some of the finest culinary delights from all over the world, her heart (and taste buds of her heritage) still remain loyal to the flavors of Greek and Italian cuisine. Her work has also appeared on CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR radio, USA Network, and in Travel World News, First for Women, LA Times and USA Today, The Hellenic Journal, Greek Circle Magazine and she has interviewed over 100 top celebrities. While Cynthia was at the 1st Annual Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, she asked the stars on the red carpet to name their favorite Greek dishes, and the answers were as varied as the celebrities themselves! Cynthia enjoys living in the Mediterranean climate of Santa Barbara, California where she delights in the bounty of readily available organic produce and daily farmer markets. Her husband James is an American-Greek who is a very appreciative taste tester and the producer of Ancient and Modern Greece documentaries at www.CelebrateGreece.com. They were married in a traditional Greek Island wedding on the romantic island of Santorini, Greece. Together they enjoy celebrating all things related to the Mediterranean, from savoring the cuisine, producing videos, Greek dancing, traveling and enjoyment of life. Opa! To learn more about Cynthia and her passion for celebrating and creating love-infused meals and memories around the table, please visit www.ModerndayGoddess.com. Her site also features videos of her work, Romancing the Table™ blog with recipe stories and radio show replays. She can be contacted at cynthia@moderndaygoddess.com. |
Cynthia Daddona is an award-winning on camera personality, food and travel journalist and host of #1 NY Times About.com Greek Food Guide video, “A Greek Islands Destination Cooking Class” DVD. Her successful radio talk show Romancing the Table™, is dedicated to exploring the key ingredients to healthy Mediterranean recipes and cooking, romantic dining, destinations, love relationships and epicurean stories that delight the palette, heart and soul.
Steven Jenkins |
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Jenkins has written extensively for every major food and wine publication, including Gourmet, Food & Wine, Sante and Food Arts, as well as columns for the major trade magazines and domestic and international culinary journals. Jenkins is credited with having introduced countless cheeses and foodstuffs to New Yorkers (and subsequently the rest of the United States), and continues to generate remarkable publicity and public awareness for food artisans and artisanal foods (it was he who popularized the use of the terms “artisan/artisanal” as well as “cheesemonger”). He was recently named one of the 25 most important people in the history of the American specialty foods industry by Gourmet Retailer in their 25th-year anniversary issue. Steven is a frequent guest lecturer at numerous venues here and in Europe (The National Geographic Society, The University of Pennsylvania, The Rhode Island School of Design, The Smithsonian, The 92nd Street Y, The Aspen Food & Wine Classic, The Fairway Masterclass Series); he is also in demand as a judge at various competitions and culinary schools (The American Cheese Society, The French Culinary Institute), and makes frequent appearances on television (PBS with Jacques Pepin and Julia Child; a featured segment on CBS’s Sunday Morning with Charles Collingwood (Martha Teichnor reporting). He is a regular guest on the award-winning NPR program The Splendid Table with Lynn Rossetto Kasper. Jenkins was a board member of The American Cheese Society and is an active participant in the important work of the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust (Cambridge, Massachusetts). His many responsibilities at the highly regarded Fairway Markets (New York City) include the pioneering (exclusive) importation of traditional foods from over a hundred European companies. Jenkins lives in New York City with his wife Michelle and their children, Max and Lily. |
Variously described in print as “New York’s highest-profile grocer” (New York Magazine), “the enfant terrible of the fancy food business” (The New York Times), and “the eminence grise of American cheesemongers” (The New Yorker), as well as having been featured in New York Magazine’s “The 100 Smartest New Yorkers” issue, Steven Jenkins has worked at New York’s Fairway Markets for most of his career. He was the first American inducted into France’s ancient and elite Guilde du Maitre-Fromagers de St. Uguzon, in 1976, and was only recently elevated to “prud’homme”, the guild’s highest award. In 1980 he was welcomed into France’s super-honorary society, Taste-Fromage, once again, the first American. Jenkins’ first book, Cheese Primer (Workman, 1996), decidedly a “chef-d’oeuvre” (eight years in the making; starred, boxed review in Publisher’s Weekly), is already in its record-breaking tenth printing. Cheese Primer won the James Beard Award and was nominated for the Julia Child Award of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Cheese Primer is regarded as the single-most indispensable book in the world of cheese for both professionals and amateurs.
Agalia Kremezi |
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With a group of her friends, she has created Kea Artisanal, a Culture and Food holiday program in Kea. She is in the process of completing her next book, with the provisional title Mediterranean Hot & Spicy: Fast and Healthy Cooking from Southern Italy, Greece and the Middle East, which will be published in the Spring of 2009 by Broadway Books (Randon House). Her latest book The Foods of the Greek Islands, published the fall of 2000 by Houghton Mifflin, was chosen as the first of the year’s best cookbooks by the New York Times and received raving reviews from Food and Wine, Time, People and many other newspapers and magazines. Her first book, The Foods of Greece, published by Stewart, Tabori and Chang won the Julia Child "First Book" award, in April '94. Her next two books, Mediterranean Pantry and Mediterranean Hot, were both published by Artisan/Workman and later translated into Greek. She is part of the team of Master Chefs --together with Roger Verger, Michel Roux, Richard Olney and others-- creating a small illustrated collection of Meze and Antipasti, for the series "Classic Recipes" published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, in London. She has also published in Athens two collections of her food columns that became best sellers in Greece. She has appeared on Good Morning America, CBS, and other major and local TV stations and also taught at Macy’s Degustibus, at the French Culinary Institute in New York, at the Culinary Institute in Greystone, Napa CA and many other cooking schools around the country, promoting her books and authentic Mediterranean cuisine. Cooking was always her passion and she is an avid collector of cookbooks and recipes from all over the world. She has studied the history of ancient Greek and Mediterranean cuisines and has taken part in and given papers to many world conferences on food. She is a consultant for Molyvos, the upscale Greek restaurant in New York (7th avenue at 55th street) which was awarded three stars by Ruth Reichl of the New York Times.
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Aglaia Kremezi was born in Athens and the last six years lives permanently on Kea, an island of the Cyclades. She is a journalist, writer, photographer and food columnist for the Sunday Athens paper Kyriakatiki Eleftherotypia and the Greek edition of Votre Beaute magazine. She is also a contributing author for the Los Angeles Times, Gourmet, BBC Good Food, Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, Food Arts and other publications.
Lorna Sass |
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Lorna became interested in pressure cooking during the mid-eighties after her vegetarian mother carted a cooker back from India and began producing delectable curries and dals in a matter of minutes. Realizing that the pressure cooker could produce “fast food” that was both nutritious and delicious, Lorna began culinary experiments that led to the publication of Cooking Under Pressure by William Morrow in 1989. Cooking Under Pressure sold briskly from the start and has been back to press 28 times, claiming best-seller status. With almost 250,000 copies in print Cooking Under Pressure is considered the bible on the subject and Lorna is considered the country’s leading authority on pressure cooking. Lorna followed Cooking Under Pressure with Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure, and The Pressured Cook. In 2005, William Morrow published Lorna’s Pressure Perfect, her definitive work on pressure cooking. This latest volume contains over 200 recipes and divulges all of the cooking secrets Lorna has developed over almost two decades of Cooking Under Pressue. For many years, Lorna was a vegan. During this time she wrote many vegan cookbooks, including Recipes From an Ecological Kitchen (now called LORNA SASS' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen in the paperback edition), Lorna Sass’ Short-Cut Vegetarian, The New Soy Cookbook, and The New Vegan Cookbook. Her fourteenth cookbook, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way, was published by Clarkson Potter in November 2006 and was recently awarded the prestigious James Beard Award in the "healthy focus" category, reflecting her passion for an organic, health-promoting, sustainable way of eating. It is already in its third printing! Lorna's food articles have been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Vegetarian Times, and Metropolitan Home. She writes a monthly food column for the newsletter of www.localharvest.org and essays for the TVFN web site. Lorna is a member of Slow Food and the Women's Culinary Alliance and an alumna of Les Dames des Escoffier. For further information, visit www.lornasass.com.
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Lorna Sass is a widely published food writer and an award-winning cookbook author. Her career in food began as a culinary historian: while studying for her PhD in medieval literature at Columbia University, Lorna wrote four historical cookbooks that were published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Michele Scicolone |
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In addition to writing, Michele is also a spokesperson and cooking teacher. In 2005- 2006, she represented Williams-Sonoma’s Mastering cookbook series on a 10-city tour giving television and radio interviews, cooking classes, demonstrations and book signings. Her book 1,000 Italian Recipes, was nominated for a 2004 James Beard Award and was a main selection of The Good Cook book club. Italian Holiday Cooking (Morrow) was chosen as one of the Top Ten Cookbooks of the year 2001 by Food & Wine magazine. Michele is also the author of Savoring Italy, published in 1999 by Williams Sonoma and Time Life. Pizza--Anyway You Slice It! was co-authored with her husband Charles and published in 1998 by Broadway Books. The book received high praise in a New York Times review. A Fresh Taste of Italy was nominated for a Julia Child Award as the Best Italian Cookbook of 1997 by the International Association of Culinary Professionals and was chosen as one of the ten best cookbooks of the year by Amazon Books. La Dolce Vita, a collection of recipes for "life's sweet pleasures" Italian desserts, has been released in a paperback edition from Harper Perennial. It was nominated as the Best Dessert Book of 1994 by the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Her previous book, The Antipasto Table, was nominated by the James Beard Foundation as Best Italian Cookbook of 1991. Michele is also the author of two books on fish cookery published by Harmony Books. Michele’s articles have appeared in Bon Appetit, The Wine Spectator, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wine Spectator, The New York Times, Gourmet, Food Arts, and many other publications. Television appearances include Emeril Live, The CBS Morning Show, Good Morning America, and Cooking Live, as well as many local television and radio programs. She has served as a judge for both the Julia Child and James Beard Foundation Book Awards. She teaches cooking at schools around the country including De Gustibus at Macy’s, Sur La Table, The Institute for Culinary Education, and Ramekins. Michele has been a spokesperson for Williams Sonoma and the Italian Trade Commission and has lectured on Italian culture and cuisine at The Smithsonian Institute, Hofstra, and Henderson State Universities. Michele's food career began after graduation with a B.S. in food science and nutrition from Hunter College. She worked for 3 years at Ladies Home Journal as an assistant food editor and later in the food departments of several other magazines on a freelance basis. Along with her husband Charles, a freelance consultant and the wine and beverage director for New York’s I Trulli Restaurant and Enoteca, and Vino, an Italian wine store, she hosts food and wine tours to Naples, Sicily, Puglia, Emilia Romagna and Piedmont several times a year. |
Michele Scicolone is a cookbook author and writer who specializes in food, wine and travel. She is the author of 16 cookbooks, the latest being The BLT Cookbook co-authored with chef Laurent Tourondel, and Essentials of Italian Cooking (Williams-Sonoma). Entertaining with the Sopranos was published by Warner Books in 2006. Her previous book, The Sopranos Family Cookbook, co-authored with Allen Rucker, was a number one New York Times bestseller published in 9 languages. She was also one of the editors of the 75th Anniversary edition of the classic Joy of Cooking.
David Shalleck |
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David Shalleck has worked for over two decades in the food business as a chef and television culinary producer alongside some of America’s most celebrated chefs. He is the author of
Ana SortunChef/Owner, Oleana |
