Lisa Donovan

Today

Service and pastry mark the early structure of Lisa Donovan’s career. At TradeWinds in Valparaiso, Florida, she worked as a server, learning the tempo of the dining room. At Husk in Nashville, she served as pastry chef, where timing, texture, and restraint mattered as much as flavor. Those roles set the terms of a practice built around discipline and attention. Today, she is food columnist of The New York Times Magazine, where the same precision applies in print: voice, cadence, and the ability to hold a reader with what lingers after the meal.

Signature

Lisa's signature dishes include Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, Buttermilk Chess Pie, and Dear Women: Own Your Stories. The titles do a lot of the work: one leans into devotion and appetite, one into the grammar of a classic pie, one into direct address and inheritance. Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger carries need as well as wit; Buttermilk Chess Pie points to comfort handled with care; Dear Women: Own Your Stories makes voice part of the plate. Taken together, they show a maker working at the intersection of sweetness, structure, and statement.

In Their Words “I’m enjoying motherhood so much these days in a way that wasn’t quite as natural to me in the past.” “There isn’t much time when I’m not in the kitchen baking.”