Bonnie Stern wants everyone to have fun cooking. For almost 35 years, that’s been her number one goal and the secret to her success as one of Canada’s best-known and most-loved food experts.
Owner of the Bonnie Stern School of Cooking and Cookware Shop in Toronto since 1973, she has taught countless people that cooking can be easy, fun and delicious through her cooking classes, her 12 best-selling cookbooks, her two national television shows, Bonnie Stern Cooks and Bonnie Stern Entertains, her countless appearances on other television and radio shows, as well as her weekly column in the National Post and the many articles she has contributed to magazines and newspapers throughout U.S. and Canada.
Stern even produced a series of CDs for Sony Music called A la Carte, combining classical music with recipes and entertaining tips. In 2004, her cookbook Bonnie Stern’s Essentials of Home Cooking won the prestigious International Association of Culinary Professionals Award.
Ironically, Stern had no intention of pursuing a career in the food industry when she enrolled at George Brown. She had just finished a degree in English literature at the University of Toronto and was taking a break before going back to become a librarian. But she found that doing something so “practical and creative and physical and artistic” really appealed to her and by the time she finished the program, her career plans had changed. Within two years of graduating, she opened her own cooking school, which has earned an international reputation for excellence and attracted many of world’s best chefs as guests. Master Chef Jacques Pepin considers it “one of the best cooking schools anywhere.”
Stern also channels her love of food and cooking into activities that benefit the community, including raising funds through her cookbooks for the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Hospital for Sick Children.
