The Best of Food and Food Culture from Around the World

 

Cooks Without Borders makes the lives of engaged cooks more delightful and delicious by exploring food and food culture from around the world — and bringing them the best of it. 

The digital destination consists of stories, recipes, cookbook reviews, Cuisine Guides and video interviews with fascinating people in the food world.

Founded in 2016 by Leslie Brenner, a James Beard Award-winning former journalist and food editor who is Cooks Without Borders’ editor in chief, the destination is all about the story behind the dish, the wonders of an ingredient, the culture informing a technique. We mine origins and dive into traditions, and then use what we learn to find or develop the best possible expression of the dishes that captivate us.

As a result, and because our recipe testing and development is so rigorous, users can be confident that the recipes they find at Cooks Without Borders are outstanding — and that they work brilliantly.

An Award-Winning Site

In 2021, Cooks Without Borders won a prestigious People’s Voice Webby Award for Best Personal Blog/Website, competing against websites and blogs from all around the globe. It was also one of three finalists the same year for an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Digital Media Award for Best Food Blog.

In 2024, Cooks Without Borders won a second People’s Voice Webby Award — this time for its Substack newsletter, which won in the category Best Email Newsletters: Health, Wellness and Lifestyle. It is also one of three finalists once again for the IACP Digital Media Award for Best Food Blog. The winner will be announced in late September.

Leslie’s cultural expertise, journalist skills and curatorial chops give Cooks Without Borders its value as a recipe-focused mecca for culinary culture. CWB’s foundation is now built and boasts a wealth of outstanding content. Once the site is appropriately funded and staffed, it is poised to explode.

Target Audience: Passionate, Engaged Cooks

• People who geek out on cooking, who can think of nothing more delightful than spending a whole day in the kitchen

• Users range widely in experience, from young people who are starting to fall in love with cooking, to long-time dedicated home cooks, to cookbook authors and chefs

• Cooking without borders is a way of life for those who want to expand their culinary and cultural perspectives and become fluent in the cooking traditions, techniques, ingredients and recipes of various cultures around the world

• Our audience is growing, and it is engaged: uniques are up 55% since January 2020 and page views are up 48%.

 

The Offerings

Stories

From quick takes to longform explorations, Cooks Without Borders stories allow users maximum discovery, and help them broaden and deepen their own expertise.

Stories guide them toward:

• Flavors, ingredients and cuisines that are super compelling at the moment (Featured Stories)
• What’s behind their favorite dishes
• Culinary cultures that are new to them or they’re eager to explore more deeply
• Ingredients they’ve always wondered about or want to make themselves
• Must-have cookbooks, cookbook reviews and author profiles
• Seasonal evergreen cooking stories and roundups
• Deep dives and projects
• The “why” behind dishes’ popularity
• Fantastic fusions and flat-out fabulous creations

Recipes

We pride ourselves in creating recipes for the best possible version of dishes. A Moussaka for the Ages. World Butter Chicken. Quintessential Quiche Lorraine. A magnificent Moroccan-inspired couscous. Ultimate Ragù Bolognese. Bad-ass Baba Ganoush. Your Favorite Chocolate Mousse.

We also curate the most outstanding dishes from cookbooks, chefs and other sources. Shrimp and Grits. Yangzhou Fried Rice. Chicken Musakhan. Gumbo des Herbes. Okonomiyaki.

Recipes are organized by CULTURE and by COURSE — both accessible from the home page. We also boast a deep trove of PLANT-BASED recipes.

 

Cuisine Guides

Launched (beta) in 2023, our Cuisine Guides — each headed by a Culinary Expert — are like mini-cooking schools. They’re meant for dabbling, exploring or immersing in that cooking culture and its techniques. Users can look up an ingredient, learn more about a dish, find cookbooks we recommend for that cuisine, or see which 5 or 10 or 20 recipes we consider essential. They’ll also see all our stories and recipes for each cuisine within each Guide.

First up are the Mexican Cuisine Guide and the French Cuisine Guide. Both are still in process of being built out.

 

E-Commerce

• Affiliate sales partnerships: Bookshop.org; Amazon; ThermoWorks
• Cooks Without Borders Cookbook Shop
• CWB Cookshop (Holiday Pop-Up Shop during the holidays)

 

Video Events

We produced a live video Q&A series in 2021 — six episodes featuring Makers, Shakers & Mavens in the food world. We see huge potential in resuming production.

 

CWB Branded Cookbooks

• 21 Favorite Recipes from Cooks Without Borders. Published in 2021 and updated in 2023, our e-cookbook featuring original CWB recipes is currently on sale, with 100% of profits donated to World Central Kitchen.

• We’re currently working on Fabulous French Recipes from Cooks Without Borders (also an e-cookbook), to be published in early 2024. Forty-four original CWB recipes.

 

Newsletter

Cooks Without Borders Substack newsletter was launched in April 2023.
• Free monthly version has more than 2,300 subscribers, and growing
• Paid weekly version has 90+ subscribers, and growing

If you’re a media person who would like a complimentary weekly subscription, just let us know — send us your email address, and we’ll be delighted to sign you up and send you a link to the archive.

 


About Leslie Brenner and the Trajectory of Cooks Without Borders

Founder and editor in chief Leslie Brenner is a former journalist who served as The Dallas Morning News’ longtime restaurant critic, The Los Angeles Times’ food editor and a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. The winner of a long list of honors, including two James Beard Awards, Leslie is a self-taught cook with an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University and a BA in English from Stanford University. Culinary, she has deepest experience with French cuisine (married to a Frenchman, she spends part of every year in France). Mexican is another strength, as she has traveled widely in Mexico, and produced The Masa Movement Project. She is the author of five books about food and wine, including American Appetite: The Coming of Age of a Cuisine and The Fourth Star: Dispatches from Inside Daniel Boulud’s Celebrated New York Restaurant.

Leslie founded Cooks Without Borders in 2016, and the following year stepped away from journalism to work in the food & beverage industry, putting CWB on hiatus. She launched a restaurant consulting business, Leslie Brenner Concepts, in 2019, and relaunched CWB in 2020. She and CWB design partner Juliet Jacobson (an award-winning designer, co-founder of Digital Gizmo) redesigned the site in March 2020. Cuisine Guides were launched (beta) in 2023. Lean and bootstrapped — and committed to optimizing the user experience — they worked within the confines of the Squarespace platform and kept the site ad-free. To date, all its written and photographic content, save for two guest-written stories, has been created by Leslie.

Much as the technical expertise of cooking-science guru J. Kenji López-Alt was instrumental in catapulting Serious Eats into cooking site stardom, Leslie’s cultural chops, journalistic and curatorial skills and earned credibility give Cooks Without Borders its value as a recipe-focused mecca for culinary culture.

 

The Cooks Without Borders Difference

INTERNational Focus

Cooks Without Borders is the only dedicated international cooking website focused on culture. At a time when racism threatens American democracy, fostering cultural understanding through learning about other people’s culinary traditions feels like exactly what we need more of.

The Highest Standards

Stories and recipes are backed up by rigorous recipe-testing, careful curation and the highest level of journalistic practices.

Commitment to Cookbooks

CWB is the only award-winning recipes website with a deep commitment to covering cookbooks and cookbook authors, and putting recipes from cookbooks through their paces. We thoroughly test recipes from the books we review before reviewing them.

Outstanding SEO

We may be in our infancy in terms of traffic-building, but we’re an SEO powerhouse for our size. Try these searches:

“duck and porcini ragu”
“best Ottolenghi cookbook”
“leek broth”
“hand whisked mayo”
“how to make tetelas”

Unique and Distinctive

Unlike myriad generic recipe websites, Cooks Without Borders isn’t for everyone. Nor is it niche. It’s for passionate cooks who care about culture and don’t want to waste their time sorting through decent recipes; they want the best and value our curation. The untapped potential is huge.

Giant Umbrella

Sites that focus on one genre of cooking — such as Mexico in My Kitchen, The Woks of Life, Viet World Kitchen and The Mediterreanean Dish — have huge appeal, and users value the expertise of their editors/founders. Cooks Without Borders multiplies the potential audience by gathering all cultures under one giant cross-cultural umbrella.

 

User Demographics

Because Cooks Without Borders is ad-free, and our platform (Squarespace) doesn’t provide much demongraphic information, we don’t yet know a lot about our readers, except that our audience is international, and it is growing.

Cooks Without Borders’ audience is concentrated in the U.S. and other Anglophone cultures, and scattered through 99 nations.

• Users of the Cooks Without Borders website are concentrated in the U.S., but spread across the Anglophone world, and scattered in 99 nations.

• United States - 57.8%
• United Kingdom - 11.2%
• Canada - 7.6%
• Australia - 6.6%
• Germany - 1.4%
• Netherlands - 1.2%
• France - 1.1%
• New Zealand - 1%
• India - .59%

 

Contacts

Leslie Brenner
Founder and Editor in Chief
leslie@cookswithoutborders.com