“My culinary foundation informs everything I do—from recipe development and narrative voice to visual storytelling and brand strategy. I bring a practitioner’s eye to every project, translating lived kitchen experience into books, images, activations, and stories that resonate with real cooks and real audiences.”

Services

• Cookbook research and writing

• Cookbook Proposal Writing & Editing

• Food Styling

• On-site Art Direction for Food Photography

• Culinary Branding

Andréa Lawson Gray is a James Beard Award–winning cookbook writer, food stylist, and culinary anthropologist. She draws on more than two decades in professional kitchens to collaborate with working chefs—bringing fluency in recipe development, production workflows, and the practical realities of creating cookbooks while running a restaurant.

She began her writing career in San Francisco’s Mission District, covering Mexican food and holiday traditions for Examiner.com. After analyzing reader data and identifying strong engagement around celebration foods and regional cuisine, she developed her first cookbook, Celebraciones Mexicanas, laying the foundation for a career documenting underrepresented and often misunderstood foodways through both scholarship and practice.

Earlier in her career, Andréa built, opened, and ran Taipan Diane, a 50-seat Asian-fusion restaurant on City Island in New York. In 2015, she founded Private Chefs of the SF Bay, a collective of top private chefs in and around the Bay Area. She also maintains a home in Mexico, grounding her work in ongoing, place-based culinary research.

She divides her time between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York