Daniel Gritzer

Daniel joined the Serious Eats culinary team in 2014 and has been writing recipes, equipment reviews, articles on cooking techniques, and more ever since. Prior to that he was a food editor at Food & Wine magazine, and the staff writer for Time Out New York's restaurant and bars section. He has been nominated twice for an IACP award in instructional food writing, and is a three-time winner of the IACP award for Best Culinary Website.

Prior to working in food media, Daniel cooked for several years at a variety of New York City restaurants, with a focus on American, Italian, and French cuisine—a career that technically started at the age of 13, when he began staging at the legendary restaurant Chanterelle. He also spent nearly a year working on organic farms in Europe, where he harvested almonds and Padrón peppers in Spain, shepherded a flock of more than 200 sheep in Italy, and made charcuterie in France. When not working on, thinking about, cooking, and eating food, he blows off steam (and calories) as an instructor of capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art.

Daniel's Desert Island Food: "When I was 15 years old, I did an Outward Bound course in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. We backpacked off-trail for upwards of 18 hours a day, in the rain, through fierce lightning storms and impossible dark, long after our flashlights had died. The food was stale and moldy. Late at night, as delirium set in and our eyes played tricks on us, most kids pined for Waffle House. I only dreamed of dim sum. I don't like the idea of a desert island food—who wants to eat only one thing, no matter how delicious, for the rest of their lives? But if dim sum was what I wanted most in those weeks that came closest to a desert-island experience for me, I'm gonna have to go with that."

Daniel holds a holds a BA with honors in anthropology from Columbia University, but his food education began at the age of 13 when he began an informal stage (internship) at Chanterelle, the legendary New York City fine-dining restaurant. He later returned to Chanterelle after college for a more formal stage, working nights and weekends to build up enough restaurant experience to eventually land a paying job. His first full-time gig was with Tuscan chef Cesare Casella at his Manhattan restaurant Beppe, cooking at every station on the line, translating Casella's family recipes from Italian, and extensively testing recipes from old Italian cookbooks for research and menu development; he eventually became the sous chef there, running the busy lunch service. From there he honed his modern French-cooking fundamentals under chef Didier Virot at Aix, and learned the art of larger-scale food production at Union Square Hospitality Group's high-end catering operation.

In between those restaurant jobs, Daniel spent nearly a year working on organic farms in Europe to better understand the agricultural side of the food we eat. There, he harvested almonds and Padrón peppers in Spain, harvested wine grapes and shepherded a flock of more than 200 sheep in Italy, and made charcuterie in France.

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