Copyright 2012 Harvey Wang
Andrew Friedman has made a career of chronicling the life and work of some of our best chefs. He started down that path in 1997, when Alfred Portale asked him to collaborate on the Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook. The book was lauded in such publications as Bon Appétit, Gourmet, and The New York Times, and earned the IACP/Julia Child Cookbook Award for “Best Chef or Restaurant Cookbook,” as well as a James Beard Award nomination for “Best General Cookbook,” and is widely considered a classic in the “chef cookbook” genre.
Since then, Andrew has collaborated on cookbooks and other projects with Laurent Tourondel, Michelle Bernstein, Bill Telepan, Jimmy Bradley, David Waltuck, and former White House Chef Walter Scheib, among many others, receiving another IACP award along the way. He also co-edited, and largely ghost-wrote, the popular anthology Don’t Try This at Home, in which forty chefs including Daniel Boulud, Mario Batali, Scott Conant, Marcus Samuelsson, Wylie Dufresne, and Eric Ripert shared humorous kitchen-disaster stories.
In 2009, Andrew penned his first non-fiction book, Knives at Dawn: America’s Quest for Culinary Glory at the Legendary Bocuse d’Or Competition. To write it, he trailed the 2009 US team—headed by The French Laundry’s chef de cuisine Timothy Hollingsworth—from its formation in Orlando, Florida, through its training under the auspices of Thomas Keller in Yountville, California, and into battle in Lyon, France. The book received many plaudits, including selection on Amazon.com’s “Best of the Month” list, and raves from Publisher’s Weekly, Eater.com, The Washington Post, and others.
Andrew has contributed articles to O—The Oprah Magazine and other publications and websites. He has been profiled in The New York Daily News and New York Magazine, and interviewed for, or featured in articles in, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR’s Taste of the Nation.
Andrew’s next projects include books with chefs Paul Liebrandt and Michael White. An editor at-large for TENNIS magazine, he also co-authored (with American tennis star James Blake) the New York Times bestselling memoir Breaking Back. Before becoming a working writer, Friedman developed film and television projects for producers Steven Haft and Marcia Nasatir. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Columbia University, and is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute’s “La Technique” program. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his family.