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Kara Baskin

It’s a good time to be a culinary professional. Gone are the days of cooking as a hardscrabble vocation; now, chefs are celebrities and everyday gourmets meticulously chronicle their kitchen exploits and restaurant meals on social media.

Amanda Hesser ’93 is at the delicious heart of it all.

Relatable, candid — and happy to plumb her own life for juicy copy — she helms Food52 with business partner Merrill Stubbs. Their website for home cooks features crowd-sourced recipes; lovingly curated kitchenware; and an oven-warm sense of community. Since launching in 2009, the site has raised $9 million in venture funding and hosts more than 4.3 million unique visitors per month.

The success is a tribute to Hesser’s vision and work ethic, cultivated growing up in the Poconos, near Scranton, Pa., with a family that came together in the kitchen. “My grandmother is a really good cook and my mom cooked seasonally, pickling before it was fashionable,” she laughs.

Hesser has since enjoyed a rise that seems both fairytale and hard-won, from pursuing a scholarship to study in Europe after college to penning several lyrical, lauded books that mix memoir with recipes. The Cook and the Gardener, for example, tells of her time cooking at a French chateau; Cooking for Mr. Latte is a feisty tale of wooing her palate-challenged husband, The New Yorker writer Tad Friend.

As a dining reporter for The New York Times and food editor at The New York Times Magazine, she brought a splash of sass to a buttoned-up paper, writing about everything from fruitcake (a gift “welcomed like the flu”) to her wedding rehearsal dinner, when her caterer — her caterer! — contracted Rocky Mountain spotted fever. She even starred as herself in the 2009 movie Julie & Julia

  

“People now see food as a vital part of their identity and how they live."

Amanda Hesser '93

“People now see food as a vital part of their identity and how they live. They want to know where it comes from,” Hesser says. “They’ve begun to see cooking less as a trade and more as an art form. It’s become more mainstream and sprung up cottage industries, like raising sheep. There’s a generation of people who crave this lifestyle as opposed to more traditional paths.”

This reverential spirit infuses Food52, whose aesthetic is empowering, not intimidating. Hesser is a home-cooking evangelist, and the site aims to stoke people’s passion for food and its origins. Here, zealous home cooks comment on and share recipes, post thoughtful queries to a real-time hotline (“What to do with ultra-fresh eggs laid by lovingly raised chickens?”) and shop a curated selection of kitchen tools. One popular feature is “Amanda’s Kids’ Lunch,” a column that chronicles meals she prepared for her 8-year-old twins. If you long to serve your brood something more inspired than chicken nuggets, you’ve come to the right place.

Salad Days

The culinary world of 2015 bubbles forth with TV shows, websites, blogs, and recipe-sharing sites of all kinds. Some is quality; some of it’s filler. Food52 is the former: It has won the James Beard Award for best food publication, one of the industry’s top honors. Another leading organization, the International Association of Culinary Professionals, has bestowed “Best Culinary Website” honors for the past three years. Hesser ranks among Gourmet magazine’s 50 most influential women in food. Her latest book, The Essential New York Times Cookbook, was a best seller and won a James Beard Award, too.

Seeing this résumé, many people are surprised to learn that Hesser didn’t attend an undergraduate cooking school. At Bentley, she majored in Finance and Economics — but also plated desserts at the acclaimed Michaela’s restaurant, now closed. She was smitten.

“This was my first time living close to a major city,” recalls Hesser, who now calls Brooklyn home. “I got exposed to the energy and activity of Boston, and it inspired me. There were so many people who knew what they wanted to do with their lives.”

Thus inspired, she opted to go to Europe after graduation instead of mainlining into banking or consulting. Hesser traces the decision to “a bit of youthful hubris” and her father’s death between her junior and senior years.

“Losing a parent is a huge and devastating change in your life,” she says. “At that time, part of me felt I had nothing to lose by taking a risk, because I'd already lost something much more important.”

Fork in the Road

With her mom’s blessing, Hesser traveled to Europe during her senior-year spring break and pluckily researched restaurants where she wanted to cook, introducing herself to owners and learning the landscape. Then she applied for a scholarship from the prestigious Les Dames d’Escoffier International, a professional society for women in food. Its scholarships were reserved for stateside schools. Hesser crafted a proposal for a European scholarship — that business background came in handy — and landed funds to attend the elite culinary school La Varenne in Burgundy, France.

Hesser paid her dues working in restaurant kitchens throughout France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Her education included a year cooking at the Burgundy chateau of La Varenne founder Anne Willan, where tangling with the crusty Monsieur Milbert would inspire Hesser’s literary debut.

In 1997, she was back in the States working on The Cook and the Gardener and writing freelance articles. One day the phone rang. “It was a Florida number . . . I thought it was a crank call,” she says.

But no, the caller was a bonafide editor at the Times, whose outreach launched her career at the paper, first in its dining section and then at The New York Times Magazine.

Over time, though, Hesser grew restless: There was something missing amid the growing cacophony of food-obsessed voices. She left the Times in 2008 and, a year later, launched Food52 with fellow writer Merrill Stubbs, a bold move at the height of the recession.  

“We wanted a site that had a point of view that felt personal, not just a mosh pit of voices,” she says. “Especially with food, people have such an emotional connection. They want to feel why cooking matters. We wanted that connection to be strong.”

  

We wanted a site that had a point of view that felt personal, not just a mosh pit of voices.

Amanda Hesser '93

But really: Who leaves the world’s most respected newspaper to start a website during an economic crisis? Hesser knew she had to follow her instincts, as she’d done in the kitchens of Europe years ago.

“I felt I’d done every interesting thing I could related to food at the paper,” she says. “I needed to be more entrepreneurial. I was getting too comfortable.”

Raised on Risk

With parents who had run a car dealership back in Pennsylvania, Hesser knew what it was like to start something from scratch.

“It’s in my blood. I was used to a certain level of discomfort,” she says. “I had to focus on trying something new that I was enthusiastic about. I was forced to evaluate what made me happy and that alone, while difficult, was a good exercise.”

The business idea was simple yet strategically ambitious. “We wanted to create the first crowd-sourced cookbook in 52 weeks,” she recalls — hence the site’s name. “In centering the concept around a cookbook, we knew we could sell it to a publisher, get a book advance and use it to build our site, while testing whether there was really a company to build.”

As it turned out, working at The New York Times and launching an online startup have plenty in common.

“Being a journalist is great training for starting a company,” she says. “You use a lot of the same skills: working quickly, being resourceful, efficiently finding the best people to talk to about topics and issues, operating on a very tight budget.”

Pre-existing connections with publishers helped, too. Together, she and Stubbs created a site that reflects their particular brand of entrepreneurship.  

“There’s the entrepreneur who can write an idea on a napkin and sell it to an investor for lots of money and then figure out how to execute on it,” explains Hesser. “The other kind is the student who sits at the front of the class, who needs to prove the idea valid. Merrill and I are in that group.”

Choosing the right business partner is a lot like perfecting a recipe — you need balance. Their dynamic, forged over previous years of working together, keeps the business going.

“Starting a business is a very intense experience,” Hesser notes. “In many ways, a successful business partnership is less about complementary skill sets and more about trust and respect.”

Methodically, they tested their idea in beta and proved its worth over several rounds of investment. Hesser calls the process “a mix of measuring true metrics, plus grit and determination.” The cooking community has responded in droves, eager for a hospitable place to connect with and learn from fellow food-lovers.

After several rounds of funding, the company now has 45 employees and keeps growing. This summer, Food52 launches a gift registry and its very own iOS app, showcasing recipes, tips and trends. Hesser is also working on expanding the retail side of the business. This spring, Food52 published Genius Recipes, its first imprint with Ten Speed Press and already a New York Times best seller.

“You have to keep pushing forward with confidence. There’s a lot of competition in our space,” says Hesser. “It’s nice not to have competition — but I also think it’s helpful. It raises everyone’s game.”

Sweet success, indeed.

CONNECT WITH AMANDA:

food52.com

 

Kara Baskin writes on food and lifestyle for The Boston Globe and magazines including Boston and Yankee. She also edited the Grub Street Boston food site for New York Magazine. Connect with her:

Photos by James Ransom, Mark Weinberg, Bobbi Lin