Brian Levy

Location: Connecticut

Expertise: Desserts, baking, savory, creative ingredients (alternatives to dairy, gluten, and added sugar)

Brian Levy is a writer, recipe developer, and dessert menu consultant. He worked as a pastry cook at Michelin-starred Babbo before moving on to the fields and kitchens of farms and inns and cooking as a private chef. His first cookbook, Good & Sweet, was published in 2022.

Experience

Before Brian began cooking professionally, he wanted to write about food. Having studied journalism in New York and Paris, his particular interest in culinary journalism led him to intern in one of Michelin-starred chef Michel Rostang's kitchens in France. His passion for desserts guided Brian to work as a pastry cook at the famed (and also Michelin-starred) Babbo Ristorante in New York, where he was mentored by the James Beard Foundation Award-winning pastry chef and cookbook author Gina DePalma.

Wishing to engage with his favorite ingredients (olive oil, almonds, honey, pears) at their respective sources, he moved on to farms and farm-to-table inns in Spain, France, and Martha's Vineyard and to serve as a private chef. Looking to use a different part of his brain for a while, he took a break from the kitchen to study architecture in graduate school at Yale.

He started experimenting in 2014 with developing fruit-sweetened desserts, and in 2022 he published his first cookbook on the subject, called Good & Sweet.

Brian's Favorite Condiment: I LOVE za'atar. And I hate mayonnaise.

About Serious Eats

Serious Eats, a Dotdash brand, is an award-winning food and drink website visited by over 7 million hungry readers every month. Our audience comes to us for rigorously tested recipes, science-driven cooking techniques, robust equipment reviews, and stories that offer cultural and historical context to the foods we love to eat.

Dotdash is among the largest and fastest growing publishers online, and has won over 50 awards in the last year alone, including Digiday's 2020 Publisher of the Year. Dotdash brands include Verywell, Investopedia, The Balance, The Spruce, Simply Recipes, Serious Eats, Byrdie, Brides, MyDomaine, Lifewire, TripSavvy, Liquor.com, and TreeHugger.