Bio

Just who is this Zora O’Neill anyway?

I’ve been in the kitchen since I was 3, and I have the bacon-fat burns to prove it. I taught myself to cook while getting my M.A. in Arabic literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. In fact, it was the most useful thing I learned in grad school.

Since then, I’ve catered weddings, worked the line in New York City restaurants, and run an itinerant dinner party called Roving Gastronome and a more settled one called Sunday Night Dinner in Astoria. SND is the subject of a forthcoming book from Penguin, titled F***ing Delicious!, written with Tamara Reynolds–look for the goodness in fall 2009.

I’ve also worked as a guidebook author since 2002, and have authored or contributed to more than 10 titles for Rough Guides, Lonely Planet and Moon. I’m a little compulsive about getting the details right, which is why I maintain update blogs, to let readers of my books know what’s changed since the book hit the shelves–look here for more on my specific books.

When I’m traveling, I can’t help but pay special attention to street carts, produce markets, and local culinary specialties. All of this fanaticism gets channeled into my guidebooks, as well as my cooking when I’m back home in beautiful Astoria, Queens.

My travels, for work and otherwise, have taken me to London and Amsterdam, where I worked following graduation from Princeton, then to Cairo for advanced study at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) and on to Lebanon, Syria and Morocco. Other jaunts have covered Oslo, Paris, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba.

Email for a full resume.