Chef Elizabeth Falkner

Celebrated chef, Elizabeth Falkner was born in San Francisco, grew up in Los Angeles and worked her way up in San Francisco’s top kitchens before opening her first restaurant, Citizen Cake in 1997. A decade later, she opened four more restaurants in San Francisco and New York. Today, she does recipe development and consults on numerous products and brands. She loves to teach about the importance of creativity in cooking, is an inspiring public speaker and has cooked and spoken all over the United States and in Asia and Europe. Falkner’s style of cuisine is globally inspired and she cooks both savory and sweet, traditional and modern.

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 has studied Jungshin and Iadō—both are forms of sword fighting fitness and martial arts. She also practices yoga on a regular basis, does cross fit, plays tennis, half marathon runner and the NY Marathon in 2016, and lots of cycling including ChefsCycle, a 300 mile cycling fundraiser for No Kid Hungry.

Cooking competitions are a favorite “sport” for Chef Falkner. She has competed and judged for the last 15 years on many of the television cooking competition programs including Tournament of Champions (3rd season airs end of February 2022), Iron Chef, Next Iron Chef, Top Chef Masters and more for Food Network, Cooking Channel, Bravo and NBC, as well as made appearances on many other shows. She is often featured in food and lifestyle magazines, has received multiple awards and was nominated for the James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef (2005).

Falkner was a long-time member of Women Chefs & Restaurateurs and served as president from 2014 to 2015 and again from 2019 to 2020. She has cooked at the James Beard House over a dozen times and consistently cooks at multiple events and fundraisers around the country. She continues to work with the JBF Foundation on leadership committees. She sat on the board of directors of Frameline, San Francisco’s premier LGBTQ film festival from 2004-2008.

She is one of the chefs featured in “Her Name Is Chef”, a documentary about the “Sheroes” in the restaurant business released March 2021, directed by Peter Ferriero, produced by Oaks Media Group (Amazon, Hulu, iTunes).

Deeply concerned for the hard-hit restaurant industry during the last few years, Falkner is the host and co-producer of a feature documentary, “Sorry We’re Closed” – an insider’s perspective the state of mind of chefs and how the restaurant industry deals and evolves during crisis. It will premiere June 16, 2022 at Aspen Food & Wine.

Falkner works on recipe development for multiple brands and continues to cook at events worldwide, live and virtually. One of her current projects is head of R&D for a better for you candy company called, “Behave”-launched in 2020. She has also partnered with Heather Freyer to create a date-based Amaro called T’Maro. Today you can find T’Maro at some of the best restaurants (including Alice B in Palm Springs) in the world. You can also find T-Maro at select retailers in the United States.

A graduate from San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA in film, Falkner produced two short films with food themes in 2018, “Food Games-Sustainability” which she also hosted, and a documented performance piece called “Croquembouche Samurai” she performed at SoHo House in NYC. She performed “Croquembouche Samurai” again at Outside Lands in San Francisco in October, 2021.

Publishing:
“Demolition Desserts, Recipes from Citizen Cake”, 2008, Ten Speed Press
“Cooking Off The Clock, Recipes from my Downtime”, 2012, Ten Speed Press
“REF-USE”, 2018, Self-Published, limited print and digital
“Bad Behavior Gets in the Way of Great Work”, 2019, Food & Wine Magazine

Awards:

• “Rising Star Chef” (1995) by the San Francisco Chronicle
• “Pastry Chef of the Year” (1999) by San Francisco Magazine
• “Golden Bowl” for “Best Pastry Chef” (2003) by Women Chefs and Restaurateurs
• “Golden Bowl” for “Women Who Inspire” (2003) by Women Chefs and Restaurateurs
• “10 Women with Substance and Style” (2004) by Organic Style Magazine
• “Best Pastry Chef” nominee (2005) by the James Beard Foundation
• “Charles M. Holmes Award” (2005) by the Human Rights Campaign
• 2012 World Pizza Championship, 1st Place, Naples Italy.
• 2019 Blended Burger Battle, 1st Place, StarChefs, Brooklyn Expo, International Chefs Congress