Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser at the 2010 Texas Book Festival.

Amanda Hesser (born 1972) is an American food writer, editor and cookbook author. She was the food editor of The New York Times Magazine and the editor of T Living, a quarterly publication of The New York Times.

After finishing her first book, in 1997, Hesser was hired as a food reporter for The New York Times. Hesser has since written about the influence of Costco on the wine industry. She has uncovered the politics behind the New York City Greenmarket, and was among the first to publish a long-form article in a major American newspaper about Ferran Adria of El Bulli.

Hesser was involved in at least two conflict-of-interest cases while she was at the Times. In 2004, she accorded three stars to chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market restaurant after Vongerichten gave her book Cooking for Mr. Latte a positive blurb; the Times spotlighted the incident with an Editor’s Note. In 2007, the Times printed another Editor’s Note after Hesser published a review of Vegetable Garden by Patricia Wells without disclosing that in 1999, Wells had contributed a jacket blurb for Hesser’s book The Cook and the Garden.

Hesser applied for a buyout from the Times in late March 2008 and is no longer with the newspaper. She wrote her "Recipe Redux" feature for the Times magazine until February 27, 2011.

Hesser lives in Brooklyn Heights with her husband, Tad Friend, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and their three children.

Bibliography

Books

• The Cook and the Gardener (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999)
• Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004) [Collected Food Diary columns she wrote from 2000-2002]
• Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table, a Collection of Essays from the New York Times (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009) [Edited 26 previously published essays]
• The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010)

Anthologized works

• Women Who Eat (2003)
• Best Food Writing (2002, 2004)
• The Art of Eating (2004)
• Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (2007)