Chef Elizabeth Falkner is a world recognized, award winning chef and continues to be a leader
and pioneer in food, culinary and other media.
Falkner worked her way up in restaurants in the 1990s in the San Francisco-Bay Area, and then opened Citizen Cake in 1997, a multiple award-winning patisserie and restaurant she owned and operated for 15 years, followed by Orson in 2008. Both restaurants were in San Francisco, California. She worked in San Francisco for over 20 years before moving to New York in 2012.Today she cooks on a regular basis for Rosie O’Donnell and family and she works on recipe development with multiple brands and clients. She was completing a pizza pop up tour when the pandemic hit in 2020. She continues to cook at events and Food and Wine Festivals all over.
For Falkner, cooking competitions have been a favorite “sport.” She has competed in multiple culinary competitions including Food Network’s Tournament of Champions (seasons 1-4), Iron Chef America and Next Iron Chef, Super Chefs, in which she was a finalist and runner up. She has been a three-time competitor on Food Network Challenge, as well as a contestant on Bravo’s Top Chef Masters. In addition to competing,
Falkner has appeared as a judge on several episodes on the Top Chef series on Bravo network, multiple shows in the Food Network, and on Unique Sweets and Unique Eats on the Cooking Channel and Food Network, Canada. She has appeared on many national television shows such
as Martha Stewart, Cooking with Ming Tsai, Tyler’s Ultimate, Rachel Ray, and multiple morning shows and segments as well as other media channels.
She is an advocate for people and chefs to think more like athletes and “stay fit to cook.” She played league soccer for 28 years, and does Jungshin and Iadō—both are forms of sword fighting fitness and martial arts. She also practices yoga on a regular basis, does cross fit, pilates, has run dozens of half marathons and the NY Marathon in 2016, and more recently her focus is on cycling and tennis.
Falkner embraces the different traditions, styles and seasons in the west coast and east coast and everything between. She does both savory and sweet, traditional and modern. Falkner was nominated for a James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef (2005). Her first cookbook, Demolition Desserts (2007) was a finalist for IACP’s Julia Child Best First Cookbook
award in 2008. Cooking Off the Clock, her second book, was released August 2012, both Ten Speed Press.
She was a long-time member, on the board of directors, and served as the president of Women Chefs & Restaurateurs from April 2014 to April 2015 and 2019-2020. In the fall of 2022, she was voted on to the board of trustees of the James Beard Foundation.
Falkner graduated with a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and fell in love with the food movement in California in the early ‘90s. She has taught classes in Japan, worked in R&D for many food brands including: Mulino Bianco, Starbucks, ScharffenBerger, Emmi Cheeses from Switzerland, Behave Candy and more. She’s consulted with the Yale Hospitality team and has spoken at Yale University about mindful
cooking and produced a short film called “Food Games-Sustainability,” shot on campus at Yale.
The film turns competition on its head, with chefs making food focused on the future and only using sustainable ingredients we might have one hundred years from today. She also traveled to China with Professor Paul Freedman, food scholar, for a month cooking, lecturing and eating all
over the country in August 2019. She created a performance/art piece titled “Croquembouche Samurai” performed at SoHo House, NYC on May 31, 2018, and Outside Lands, San Francisco on October 31, 2021.
She is one of the chefs featured in “Her Name Is Chef,” a documentary about the “She-roes” in the restaurant business released March 2021, directed by Peter Ferriero, produced by Oaks Media Group (Hulu, Amazon, iTunes).
Deeply concerned for the hard-hit restaurant industry by the covid pandemic, Falkner hosts and produced a feature documentary, “Sorry We’re Closed” (2022) an insider’s perspective the state of mind of chefs and the restaurant business. The film premiered at Aspen Food & Wine, June
17, 2022, and has had screenings in Las Vegas, Sonoma and Calgary, Canada. The film has been accepted at Portland International Film Festival, Oregon, and Devour Film Festival in Nova Scotia in October 2022, Anderson Valley Film Festival and Pasadena Film Festival both in May 2023. The film is available on streaming and more beginning August 1, 2023.
