We can all learn from one another’s experiences, and so we present to you: AccelerateHER Cohort Stories! From what we’ve gathered about this amazing group of women who are part of the first cohort of the incubator program offered in partnership between TWU Center for Women Entrepreneurs and Stoke, AccelerateHER, we knew that you need to get to know them too.
Leslie Brenner founded Cooks Without Borders, a cooking website featuring spectacular recipes steeped in culture. For each recipe and story, Leslie seasons her writing and content with care and delight in sharing recipe knowledge and background to accompany them, not to mention the incredible photographs that tell the visual side of the story.
Her path into writing about food and wine began with a restaurant review for New York magazine, and it was a winding road into what she does today for Leslie Brenner Concepts and Cooks Without Borders. Read on to learn about what it’s like to walk (and sometimes run) in Leslie’s shoes.
Considering that you’re at the helm of Leslie Brenner Concepts, The Brenner Report, and Cooks Without Borders, how many days/hours of the week are you working on one of these endeavors?
Great question! Obviously, it is too many things to work on, and as a result, I have put The Brenner Report on hiatus. At the moment, for Leslie Brenner Concepts (my consulting “day-job,” as it were), I’ve been spending about 10-12 hours per week.
For Cooks Without Borders I’m spending about 50 to 60 hours per week — which includes cooking, shooting dishes and processes and doing dishes. Pretty much all I do these days is work, which probably isn’t good.
Autumn Fruit Cake - Photo courtesy of Leslie Brenner
Just curious, was your cooking website name inspired by Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders)?
It was!
How do you plan all of the content that you create? What’s your strategy?
In the past, I tried to offer an enticing mix of cookbook reviews and original recipes with stories to accompany them — keeping in mind things like seasonal considerations (what produce is in season now and what do we feel like eating), and breadth of the cultures covered. I also have tried to fit in weekly or bi-weekly newsletters to our email subscribers.
But now I need to add a whole lot of content, and work that in somehow. I need to develop and create cooking courses, and building up our cookbook review database. Creating all that content is the hardest thing I do — trying to stay on top of producing enough of it to keep our audience engaged while doing everything else I need to do to develop the business. And as much as I’ve tried to pull in others to help me with content creation, that’s a challenge I haven’t yet solved. It continues to be just me creating it.
Cooks Without Borders had some time to simmer between 2017 and 2019: What kept it from becoming a project that fell to the wayside? How did you pick back up on it?
I always loved the project, and reluctantly shut it down when I left journalism and went to work for Rebees, a food & beverage/real estate/consulting startup in Sept. 2017. I very much wanted to give my new job my full attention, and didn’t think it would be fair to my new employer — or to Cooks Without Borders — to try to run CWB in my “spare” time, nights and weekends. When I left Rebees in July 2019, I immediately thought about re-starting CWB — and did so right away.
Thai Green Curry - Photo courtesy of Leslie Brenner
How did you find your way into the food and beverage industry, having had an academic background in fiction writing from Columbia University (MFA) and in English from Stanford University (BA)?
After I got my MFA and wrote my first novel, I quickly realized it was unlikely I’d be able to make a living writing literary fiction, even if I were successful. So I started writing journalism. Freelancing, I had the freedom to write about the things that interested me, and food and cooking were always passions.
Early on, I wrote a short restaurant review for New York magazine; they loved it and asked me to write more of them. For years, about half of what I wrote was food & wine-related (including books), and then I decided to specialize in it. I was never actually a part of the industry, though, until I left journalism in 2017.
What’s your favorite thing about your workspace?
My favorite thing about my desk upstairs in our townhouse (where I write) is that I can look out of my third-floor town-house windows on the treetops. My favorite thing about my kitchen (where I cook) is that my cookbook collection covers one whole wall.
A food lover and cook’s dream: Leslie Brenner’s cookbook collection wall
How do you get yourself out of a creative rut or writer’s block?
I go for a run! (We live in Dallas, right on the Katy Trail.)
Name a woman, past or present, whom you admire or look up to. Why?
It’s funny -- this is the only question I couldn’t immediately answer, I think because there are so many of them. I’m going to go with my friend Nancy Northup, CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. We met when she was in law school at Columbia (her then-husband was in my MFA program), and was friends with her when she was a young prosecutor in the New York City District Attorney’s office prosecuting white-collar crimes.
I look up to her because she has worked tirelessly throughout her whole career for causes in which she believes deeply; she has devoted her life (including when things were very difficult) to effecting positive change.
You can visit the Cooks Without Borders website and read more about and from Leslie Brenner on Facebook and Instagram, @lesliebrennerconcepts and @cookswithoutborders! Definitely follow Cooks Without Borders on social for inspiration for recipes and stories. Just don’t do it on an empty stomach.
Elotes - Photo courtesy of Leslie Brenner