About

The City Cook is the ultimate guide to home cooking for pathetically busy, space-compromised urban dwellers. From cooking every night to only on holidays, for the beginner or the passionate culinary hobbyist, The City Cook offers encouragement to spend time in our small kitchens as well as tips for buying the best ingredients in the world.

Launched in 2007, The City Cook has been called "superb" by Manhattan Users Guide. WABC-TV said, "If anyone can find it, it's Kate McDonough." The French Culinary Institute's Alumni News said, "This should become a web destination to just about everyone we know!" And TheKitchn.com wrote, "If [it] doesn't inspire you to cook, I don't know what will."

Kate McDonough is the founder and editor of The City Cook. A native New Englander but a New Yorker at heart, she developed her home cooking skills as a domestic counterpoint to her successful but demanding career in financial communications. She studied cooking with Marcella Hazan and with butcher and teacher Jack Ubaldi in New York, and with Faith Willinger in Florence, and food writing with journalist and critic Alan Richman. She is also a graduate of the International Culinary Center's Culinary Techniques program. Her love of NYC led her to serve seven years as a member of Manhattan's Community Board Five where she chaired the Land Use & Zoning Committee and received the New York Planning Federation's Pomeroy Award for Zoning Achievement.

"As someone who's learned how to put daily cooking into a small kitchen and an over-committed life, I know that planning meals and sourcing ingredients is as important as any recipe. Become a better food shopper and you'll not only spend less time at the stove, you'll also eat better. I try to help home cooks navigate the increasingly complex cooking and ingredient landscape, learn to make good choices, and save time and money."

Kate's book, The City Cook: Big City, Small Kitchen, Limitless Ingredients, No Time, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2010. Author and former New York Times food writer Molly O'Neill said of it, "Her book makes me want to eat the whole city all over again." James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award winner Barbara Kafka said, "Learning to cook, you need this book…. For resources, you need this book. In short, you need this book." Another James Beard winner, Roy Finamore, summed it up with "Kate McDonough has exactly the right idea: making shopping and cooking part of your daily life. Her savvy strategies and recipes show how simple and delicious this can be." She is also a contributor to Paris: The Collected Traveler, published by Random House, Inc.

So here's to cooking at home in the big city.  You’ll be healthier, thinner, richer, and unless you’re at a restaurant with someone named Boulud or Robbins in the kitchen, you'll probably eat better, too.