About

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. 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 book from Penguin, Forking Fantastic! Put the Party Back in Dinner Party, written with Tamara Reynolds.

I’ve also worked as a guidebook author since 2002, and have authored or contributed to more than a dozen 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.