About Leslie

Leslie’s story

(The long version!)

A Los Angeles native, Leslie grew up in a family in which everyone cooked.

She wasn’t interested in writing, however, until she headed up north to college, at Stanford University. Her freshman comp professor was a wonderful writer and teacher who encouraged a freedom in writing she’d never experienced at Van Nuys High School. Writing fiction for the first time, she was hooked.

In that pre-foodie era, she loved inviting her professors and fellow students to dinner; the Bay Area at the time was a paradise of ingredients and inspiring restaurants, as California cuisine was being born and Napa Valley was blossoming into a wine region. She graduated with a B.A. in English (English & American Literature and Creative Writing), then returned to L.A., where she worked in several film and TV production jobs in Hollywood. On the hit television series “Cheers,” she was executive assistant to the show’s creators for two years.

Writing and teaching

But she’d always dreamed of living in New York City, and in her late twenties she upped and went — attending Columbia University’s famed MFA graduate program in Fiction Writing, where she began writing her first novel. Upon graduation, suspecting it might not be easy to support herself writing literary fiction, Leslie turned to freelance journalism — turning out book reviews for Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and The New York Times, then feature stories for magazines including New York Woman, New York magazine, Harper’s, Cosmopolitan and Travel & Leisure. She also taught English — mostly composition courses — as an Adjunct Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Los Angeles City College (when she returned briefly to L.A. for 9 months), Fashion Institute of Technology and Manhattan Institute of Technology.

Her career as a nonfiction author began in New York as well, at a time when she still had not found a publisher for her novel, Greetings from the Golden State. Around the same time, in 1991, she met her husband, the French jazz journalist and poet Thierry Pérémarti. Their son Wylie was born in 1997.

An increasingly passionate interest in food and wine had led Leslie from being a generalist as a journalist to focusing on food writing, and it was then she wrote her first non-fiction books — The Art of the Cocktail Party, Essential Flavors, Fear of Wine and American Appetite. (Read more about them here.) Although Leslie hadn’t found an American publisher for her novel, it was published in translation in France in 1999 to great acclaim. Jours Heureux en Californie, as it was called in French, was a finalist for the prestigious Prix Médicis Etranger — won that year by Björn Larsson. Knowing that another finalist, Cormac McCarthy, also did not win made her feel better. Meanwhile, American publishers took note that her book had made a huge splash, and Greetings from the Golden State was published by Henry Holt in 2001.

Back to L.A.

In 2001, Leslie and her family moved to Los Angeles, where Leslie became West Coast Contributing Editor for Travel + Leisure. She was also putting the finishing touches on The Fourth Star, which chronicled the year she spent behind the scenes at restaurant Daniel, and she was under contract for her second novel. That’s when The Los Angeles Times recruited her to serve as deputy Food editor, a life-changing opportunity. Though she had loved freelancing and resisted even interviewing for the job, once she landed there she fell head-over-heels in love with the newsroom, and knew she was meant to be a food editor.

Four months later, she was promoted to top editor of the LA Times’ renowned Food section. It was an incredible time to be living in L.A., shopping every week in its amazing farmers markets and exploring its rich and dizzyingly varied restaurants representing just about every culture on the planet. Leslie oversaw food coverage for the paper for four years, then was promoted to acting editor in chief of the L.A. Times Magazine.

During her tenure at the Times, the Food section won an unprecedented number of awards, including three Association of Food Journalists First Prizes for Best Food Section, one for Best Special Section and a James Beard Journalism Award. She left the paper in 2008.

Texas!

The following year, Leslie and her family moved to Dallas, Texas, where Leslie accepted a position as restaurant critic and dining editor at The Dallas Morning News. Holding the city’s restaurant community to a higher standard than had been the norm, Leslie helped elevate Dallas’ dining scene and bring it to national attention, and put the spotlight on the burgeoning Mexican, regional Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Lebanese and other exciting cuisines growing up mostly outside city limits. She won a long list of prizes and other accolades during her 8-year tenure at The News, and founded the paper’s prize-winning annual food and wine magazine, Palate, editing its first three issues. While working there, Leslie founded her cooking website, Cooks Without Borders.

Leslie stepped away from journalism in 2017 to work in the food & beverage industry. She led food & beverage programming, marketing and media for Tristan Simon’s recently launched Rebees, a development company focused on hospitality and culture. At Rebees, she helped to open two Dallas restaurants — Billy Can Can and Hatchways Café — and led creative development of an international food hall in Orange County, CA.

Two years later, she launched her restaurant consulting business, Leslie Brenner Concepts.

The Covid-19 crisis threw a wrench into everyone’s works. During the first part, Leslie focused on philanthropy. She co-founded Shift Dallas, which provided up-to-date essential information on things like economic aid and hunger relief to the restaurant community. She also organized the Dallas edition of Ask Chefs Anything, which provided support in the form of food boxes (via Harvest Project Food Rescue) to the immigrant workers (many undocumented) who are the backbone of the restaurant industry.

Because the crisis exposed so many cracks in the industry, Leslie wanted to be a part of finding solutions and beginning a conversation that might lead to thoughtful changes, so she began ideating once a week with two friends — a design-thinking architect in Boulder, Colorado, CarloMario Ciampoli, and an award-winning, forward-looking chef in New York, Bradford Thompson. The weekly conversations led the trio to launch a country-wide monthly conversation about restaurant evolution: The Communal Table Talks. (You’re invited to join!)

Otherwise, most of Leslie’s time during that year-plus was spent developing Cooks Without Borders, which she had suspended while she was employed by Rebees, and relaunched in late 2019. Within her Dallas townhouse is the Cooks Without Borders test kitchen, where Leslie shoots nearly all the photos for the website. She also launched The Brenner Report, parsing recent food-world news, and became a freelance contributor to The Dallas Morning News and to The Washington Post.