Antoinette Bruno left a lucrative career on Wall Street to follow her passion and desire to work in a more hospitable community. She found both in food. She enrolled in the Chefs’ Program at Ritz Escoffier in Paris. After graduating, she earned her culinary stripes working in restaurants in the south of France and then returned to the US ready for her new culinary career.
Antoinette’s goal was to demonstrate that a culinary career was not a dead end job. In fact, careers in food, wine and hospitality offered more opportunities than ever as the dining and bar scene exploded in the 1990s. In 1999, she became CEO of StarChefs.com, the first online food magazine (celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2015) whose mission is to “move the industry forward” by giving chefs the tools they need to be the best they can be in this fractious and competitive industry.
Since taking charge as CEO of StarChefs Antoinette has led the company to prominence and respect among culinary insiders. She has grown the company’s site traffic from 750,000 to 20 million hits per month.
Beyond the online magazine StarChefs influence in the culinary world is equally impressive. Each Fall it hosts the International Chefs Congress (ICC) in New York City, which provides chefs with a collaborative environment to share knowledge and experiment with new techniques. It is a forum where the world’s most innovative chefs pass their knowledge and techniques onto 1,500 of their peers.
Another program is the StarChefs Rising Stars Awards. Each year, StarChefs scours four cities across the country for their top culinary talent. Rising Stars are up-and-coming chefs and culinary professionals who represent the vanguard of the contemporary dining scene in America. The StarChefs.com Rising Stars Revue is now a major yearly event on the radar of the culinary who’s-who across the country.
StarChefs’ Board of Advisors consists of the country’s most influential chefs, including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, Norman Van Aken, Todd English, and Marcus Samuelsson.
Connect: www.starchefs.com Twitter@starchefs Facebook/StarChefs Instagram/StarChefs
Antoinette visits with The Connected Table LIVE September 16, 2:30pm,EST on W4CY and on demand at iHeart.com and the iHeart App.
