chef-name: Emily Luchetti

Chef Emily Luchetti graduated from Denison University with a BA in sociology in 1979 and moved to New York City to pursue a career in the culinary arts. She got her first job in an executive dining room near Wall Street. This experience showed her how she could get paid for doing what she loved best: cooking! She went to the New York Restaurant School, then worked in various New York City culinary establishments, building her resume and cooking skills.

In 1982, she went to France to learn how incredible food could be, and to observe the place of food in another culture. She moved to San Francisco in 1984 to join Great Chef Jeremiah Tower, who had just closed his restaurant “Santa Fe”, in Oakland, California where Great Chefs had filmed him the year before for their Great Chefs of San Francisco series. Chef Jeremiah was going to open a new restaurant in San Francisco called Stars. Emily started as a line cook and worked her way up to lunch sous chef. Finally, her true passion, making desserts, could not be ignored. In 1987 she became the pastry chef of Stars.

Great Chefs returned to San Francisco in 1994 to tape both Jeremiah and one of Chef Emily Luchetti’s great desserts for their Great Chefs-Great Cities series. Also that year she was named one of the top ten pastry chefs of the year by Chocolatier Magazine. The awards kept piling up and in 1997, she became the Executive Pastry chef of Farallon, where she still is today.

Chef Luchetti also serves on the board of the James Beard Foundation, is Dean at The International Culinary Center in New York and California, the baking columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and writes a blog for their website www.insidescoopsf.com