Kathleen Squires

Kathleen Squires is a food and travel writer whose work spans book, blog, newsprint, and glossy, appearing regularly in The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Food & Wine, Saveur, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other publications. She is also the “Cutting Class” columnist about home butchery for the Wall Street Journal’s Off Duty section. She lives in, and is obsessed with, New York City.

Kathleen is a graduate of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. She spent a decade in book publishing editing young adult fiction and nonfiction before becoming a writer. The picaresque experiences of her career journey include authoring a bestselling boy band biography (N Sync: The Official Book), being the "eighth" Real World roommate when writing the companion books for the Las Vegas and Paris seasons, and writing really awful jokes for Star Wars Kids magazine. She first started writing about food in the olden times, when Yelp was merely a sound that puppies made, at publications such as Time Out New York, New York Magazine, Paper and Citysearch.com. She has since expanded to collaborate on cookbooks and films about food culture, including the Emmy-nominated American Masters documentary James Beard: America's First Foodie, and an upcoming documentary about legendary Raoul's restaurant in New York City.

Kathleen is the co-author of the cookbooks The Coolhaus Ice Cream Book with Natasha Case and Freya Estreller (2014); The Quick Six Fix with Stuart O’ Keeffe (2016); the IACP award-winning The Journey (2014); and the IACP award-winning and James Beard Award-nominated The Book of Greens with Jenn Louis (2017). Kathleen was also awarded first prize of Les Dames d’Escoffier International’s M. F. K. Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing.

What's your desert island food?

I was going to say lobster or crab drenched in butter, but then I realized that if I'm on an island I could probably catch some lobster or crab somewhere. So instead, I'm going to say really cold beer and chili dogs because I doubt I'd be able to find either on a desert island.

What's your favorite condiment?

It's a toss-up between Cholula and chimichurri. Cholula because it delivers heat without a watery texture. And chimichurri because it improves everything—meat, fish, salads, eggs, cheese plates, and my attitude.