Michael Natkin

Location: Seattle, Washington

Education: Brown University

Michael founded the popular vegetarian food blog Herbivoracious, which became the springboard for his James Beard Award-nominated 2012 cookbook of the same name.
He left a career in software engineering after 25 years to pursue his passion for food and cooking, interning at Cafe Flora and staging at Canlis and Dirt Candy.
Michael served as the founding CTO at ChefSteps.com, where he was able to successfully merge his talent for cooking and expertise in soft engineering.

Experience

When Michael wasn’t engineering computer graphics software to bring Terminators and dinosaurs to life for Industrial Light and Magic, he was spending all his spare time cooking or reading and writing about food. Michael founded the popular vegetarian food blog Herbivoracious in 2007, exploring modern techniques and bold flavors to “reinvigorate” vegetarian cuisine. Following a six-month hiatus from his day job to travel and intern at Cafe Flora, and subsequent stages at Canlis in Seattle and Dirt Candy in New York City, Michael left behind his career in software engineering to pursue his passion for food full-time.

Michael’s cookbook Herbivoracious (2012) was published to great acclaim and nominated for a James Beard Award. His inspired vegetarian recipes have been featured in The New York Times, Saveur, Food & Wine, NPR, Chicago Tribune, Serious Eats, and The Huffington Post. In 2013, Michael joined ChefSteps.com as the founding CTO, where he merged his talent for cooking and expertise in software engineering to guide the culinary start-up to become a successful consumer hardware and services business.

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.