About Leslie Brenner

Cooks Without Borders founder and editor in chief Leslie Brenner is a former journalist who served as The Dallas Morning News’ longtime restaurant critic, The Los Angeles Times’ food editor and a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. The winner of a long list of honors, including two James Beard Awards, Leslie is a self-taught cook with an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University and a BA in English from Stanford University. She is the author of five books about food and wine, including American Appetite: The Coming of Age of a Cuisine and The Fourth Star: Dispatches from Inside Daniel Boulud’s Celebrated New York Restaurant, along with an acclaimed novel, Greetings From the Golden State.

In 2017, she stepped away from journalism to work in the food & beverage industry, helping to open two Dallas restaurants — Billy Can Can and Hatchways Café. She launched her restaurant consulting business, Leslie Brenner Concepts, two years later.

Leslie loves to cook, and enjoys foods from all cultures. Born and raised in Southern California, she reveres great produce and grew up culinarily in L.A.’s amazing farmers markets and exploring its rich and dizzyingly varied restaurants representing just about every culture on the planet. During her four-year tenure as L.A. Times’ Food editor from 2004 through 2007, the news organization’s influential Food section won an unprecedented number of prestigious First Prize Awards from the Association of Food Journalists.

Leslie and her husband — the French poet and long-time music journalist Thierry Peremarti — live in Dallas, Texas. Within their townhome is the Cooks Without Borders test kitchen, where Leslie also shoots nearly all the photos for the website. (All photos on the site and in its newsletters are by Leslie, except where otherwise noted.)

“I read a lot of cookbooks and magazines, but I most look forward to Leslie Brenner’s Cooks Without Borders. She is one of the most independent and original thinkers in food writing today. Her fine-tuned and wordly palate shines through her recipes.”

— An-My Lê, Photographer

First-Prize Awards

Books by Leslie Brenner