- The Wednesday Chef

Hello! I'm Luisa Weiss, an Italian-American writer and home cook based in Berlin, and this is my food blog.

You can also find me on my professional site, or on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.

Contact me at luisa(at)luisaweiss(dot)com.

How I got started:

I was born in Berlin and grew up in both Berlin and Brookline, MA. A lifelong bookworm, I knew I wanted to work with books for a living. After college in Boston, six formative weeks at the Radcliffe Publishing Course and one lonely year in Paris, I went on to spend a decade in New York City, where I worked in book publishing as a literary scout and, later, as a cookbook editor (for more on my career path, click here). I started this blog in the summer of 2005 to work through a mountain of recipe clippings I'd obsessively saved from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times for years. But what started out as a fun little hobby ended up changing my life. In 2010, I left New York and moved back to Berlin to live with my husband Max (who I met during that long, lonely year in Paris) and write full-time. Our son Hugo was born in 2012,and our son Bruno followed in 2017.

My books:

In 2012, I published my first book, a food memoir called My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes). In the book, I wrote about my childhood in Berlin, the homesickness I battled in the kitchen, trying to find my way as an adult, and how I finally came full circle by moving back home and marrying Max. I filled the book with my favorite recipes from my three countries: roasted Brussels sprouts and braised chicken from my years in New York, bracioline siciliane and chickpea soup from summers with my family in Italy, and Pflaumenmus and Rote Grütze from my kitchen in Berlin. If you want to read a little bit more about how the book came about, click here and here. The book is also available as a paperback, an ebook and audio book, and has been translated into Dutch, Portuguese, Polish and German. It was a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

In 2016, I published my second book, Classic German Baking, with Ten Speed Press. It's a rigorously tested collection of my favorite German, Austrian and Swiss recipes. My goal with the book was to publish the best examples of the baking tradition from German-speaking countries where home baking is still a huge part of everyday life; classics like Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and Sachertorte as well as lesser known gems like Swabian Seelen and traditional yeasted Gugelhupf. There's also an entire chapter filled with the best recipes for Christmas cookies, sweet breads and other holiday confections. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times called it one of the best cookbooks of 2016.

My work:
In addition to my writing, I work as a translator for companies like Netflix and Warner Bros. I've also worked as a freelance editor and proofreader and cookbook Americanizer. I have taught food writing and cooking and baking classes. I speak at blogging conferences (for example, on personal productivity at The Hive in Berlin, on memoir-writing and cookbook publishing at Food Blogger Connect, and on transitioning from hobby to professional blogging at What's Cooking Helsinki in 2017). I was the food columnist for Harper's Bazaar Germany from 2014 to 2017 and a selection of my columns (in German only) can be found on their website. I'm currently working on my first novel.