David Tanis has worked as a professional chef for over three decades, and is the author of several acclaimed cookbooks, including Heart of the Artichoke, which was nominated for a James Beard Award. He spent many years as a chef with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California; he ran the kitchen of the highly praised Café Escalera in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and he operated a successful private supper club in his seventeenth-century walk-up in Paris. He is an advocate for simple home cooking, with a core belief that food needn't be fussy to be beautiful. An avid traveler, his first stop on any trip is at an outdoor market, finding inspiration in regional cuisines from hither and yon. He has written for a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian/Observer, Cooking Light, Bon Appétit, Fine Cooking, and Saveur. Tanis lives in Manhattan and has been writing the weekly City Kitchen column for the Food section of the New York Times for nearly seven years.