Meet Leslie Brenner | Cooking Website Founder & Editor in Chief

We had the good fortune of connecting with Leslie Brenner and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Leslie, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
Cooks Without Borders aims to make the world a better place by connecting people through food culture, and helping them explore cultures through cooking. Understanding what an ingredient means to a people, or to a diaspora, and then considering it in a different way promotes understanding, connection and empathy. Through this understanding and empathy comes harmony, and an ideally an end to culturally-motivated violence, discrimination and seeing people as “the other.”

At the same time, people are eager to learn to cook. Our deep dives into the history and meaning of dishes, ingredients and techniques — and rigorous development and recipe testing — lead to outstanding recipes that work, and that stress the pleasure of cooking. They empower people, while helping them enjoy putting great food on the table.

In a more literal and concrete way, we recently held a fundraiser to help feed people in Ukraine, donating 100% of net proceeds of our Cooks Without Borders e-cookbook to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen for its Chefs for Ukraine campaign. The approximately $400 we raised was a drop in the bucket (we sold the cookbooks at just $5), but it led to an $800 direct donation from one reader, and then a whopping $100,000 direct donation from a foundation whose president is a reader.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I’m an entrepreneur, writer, editor and cook, a former longtime journalist who now has a thriving career in restaurant consulting and development (through Leslie Brenner Concepts) and digital publishing (at Cooks Without Borders). As a journalist, I served as Food Editor for The Los Angeles Times, as Restaurant Critic and Dining Editor for The Dallas Morning News, as Contributing Editor for Travel + Leisure, and I freelanced for dozens of publications including The New York Times, New York Magazine and many more. My six books include a novel (I have an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University), cookbooks, a wine book, and a chronicle of a year spent behind the scenes at Daniel Boulud’s flagship restaurant in New York. My writing and editing have won two James Beard Journalism Awards and other honors.

I founded Cooks Without Borders in 2015, while I was still Restaurant Critic at the DMN. I’d taken my journalism career as far as I thought I could; along the way, the challenges were many — especially post-2008 — largely because of the difficult business model for journalism. I always needed to be moving forward, learning, leading, mentoring others, and developing myself and my skills and what I can bring to the community and the world. I left the DMN in 2017 to go to work on the other side — in restaurants. I worked for a restaurant group for two years, and learned a lifetime’s worth. Six months before Covid, I launched my consulting firm, and relaunched Cooks Without Borders. Covid nearly killed my fledgling but already thriving consulting business, so I focused during that time on philanthropy — helping hospitality workers hurt by the pandemic, and offering pro-bono consulting to struggling independent restaurants and small food start-ups. I also co-founded and produced a live event series dedicated to reinventing the hospitality business in a more human, equitable and sustainable way. And mostly, I focused on developing Cooks Without Borders.

My consulting business has since come roaring back, and my greatest challenge today is balancing its demands with those of Cooks Without Borders. My greatest takeaway from all of this is to constantly flex, reinvent and evolve, do great work for the community, serve the community and help it evolve. The way we do that at Cooks Without Borders is by making food an exciting adventure, filled with pleasure, discovery and cultural connection. From all this, only good can come.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I LOVE having visitors. Here’s what I’d try to fit in in a week if one of my besties were coming. I’ll divide it into categories representing the things I like to do (which my friends also tend to love):

MUSEUMS
The Sixth Floor Museum: No one should visit Dallas without coming to this important landmark with its brilliantly presented exhibits.
Nasher Sculpture Center: One of my favorite museums anywhere.
DMA: If there’s something interesting on exhibit. If not, we’d head to Forth Worth, to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth/Kimbell Museum: both spectacular inside and out

RESTAURANTS/FOOD & DRINK
Billy Can Can: To me this is the restaurant that most purely expresses the best of Dallas — joyous, exuberant and delicious, with an excellent selection of Texas wines. (I may be biased because I helped open it, but I promise I’d love it anyway and certainly bring them there!)
Petra and the Beast: Misti Norris’ funky, byob spot in a former gas station on Haskell is some of the most creative and interesting cooking around.
Meridian: With chef Junior Borges at the helm, this modern Brazilian restaurant (which happens to be my client) is one of the most exciting new restaurants in the country. It was Eater Dallas’ and D Magazine’s Restaurant of the Year.
Molino Olōyō: If my friend Olivia Lopez was holding one of her frequent pop-ups featuring her inspired, heirloom masa-focused modern Mexican cooking, I’d definitely bring them there.
Tei-An: Exquisite Japanese by chef Teiichi Sakurai, featuring handmade soba, in One Arts Plaza.
BBQ: Probably Loro, for a fun Asian fusion spin and cool vibe, and also we’d head up to Lockhart Smokehouse in Plano. We’d overeat traditional brisket and ribs, drink local beers, and then take a walk around historic downtown Plano — always fun.
Ka-Tip — we’d stop for lunch at this fab little Thai place next to Dallas Farmers Market, then take a spin around the market.
Las Almas Rotas — great mezcal bar next to the fairgrounds.

WALKS AND OTHER
We’d drive across the Margaret Hill Hunt Bridge, for sure, then head to Oak Cliff for a walk and window-shopping (or actual shopping) around Bishop Arts.
Walk on the Katy Trail and then through the Knox District.
Walk along the river at sunset on the Trinity Skyline Trail
Walk around White Rock Lake.
Long nature walk at Cedar Ridge Preserve.
If they’re into birds, I’d take them to the Trinity River Audubon Center.
Stroll down Lower Greenville Ave. — duck in somewhere fun for a drink.

Daytrips: Head to up either Denton or McKinney, to show them a wonderful old-fashioned Texas town square, and on Saturday morning we’d head to Coppell for its outstanding farmers market and the many cool farmers and others who sell and hang there.

Shopping: If they’re into shopping, I’d take them to NorthPark. If they’re literary, we’d heat to Deep Vellum, super-cool bookshop and publisher in Deep Ellum.

I’m sure I forgot some things!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Oh, wow! No hesitation: I’d like to dedicate my Shoutout to Texas Woman’s University Center for Women’s Entrepreneurship, and Stoke Denton, who jointly sponsored AccelerateHER — a startup incubator supporting woman-owned businesses and startups. CWE Director Tracy Irby and Stoke Owner & Executive Director Heather Gregory were incredibly inspiring and supportive, and so were the other five women in my cohort, which was the inaugural class of the program. They absolutely deserve special shoutouts as well: Juli James (Playable Media); Kandace Anderson (Departmynt); Lilia Whittington (The D. Diaries); Ernanda White (Black Girls Drone) and Michelle Schodowski (Radda). I’d also like to shout out to Lassame Kettavong, Stoke’s wonderful Marketing & Community Manager. All were hugely instrumental in giving Cooks Without Borders a healthy start.

Finally (I have been so well supported!!!) I’d like to thank one of our AccelerateHER mentors, the magnificent and inspiring Jasmin Brand, and I’d like to give a second shoutout to Tracy Irby and CWE, which also awarded a generous, business-saving AssistHER grant to Leslie Brenner Concepts, Cooks Without Borders’ parent company.

Website: https://cookswithoutborders.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cookswithoutborders/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslie-brenner/

Twitter: @lesbren

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cookswithoutborders1/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5SZ-qKKtWF7EsFY98XfLLw

Other: https://www.lesliebrennerconcepts.com/ https://lesliebrenner.com/ https://brennerreport.substack.com/

Image Credits
For the portrait: Manny Rodriguez Food shots: Leslie Brenner