Divided Beginnings

Born in Berlin to an Italian mother and an American father, Luisa grew up in a multilingual family, commuting back and forth between US and Germany, with yearly trips to her family’s house in Italy.

After graduating from Tufts with a double major in English and French literature, Luisa attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course, a formative event, then moved to Paris to work at Flammarion as a slush-pile reader and editorial intern.

Hello New York!

When a year in Paris was up, Luisa moved to New York to become the assistant to the publisher of Simon & Schuster. At S&S, Luisa learned how to field Hunter S. Thompson's phone calls, take meticulous meeting minutes, and create a P&L sheet. Two out of three of these skills still serve her well today.

Thanks to a fellow Radcliffe alum, Luisa found out about literary scouting, a mostly under-the-radar career path in publishing that seemed to combine everything that defined Luisa: foreign languages, an interest in international book markets, obsessive reading, and overseas travel.
Luisa was a scout for five years, reading multiple manuscripts a week, writing book reports for foreign clients, organizing endless book fair schedules, traveling to the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs, working up the nerve to cold-call agents and editors almost every day, and pinching herself repeatedly that this was actually a job for which she was getting paid.

A Double Life

In the summer of 2005, Luisa secretly started a food blog, convinced that she was the last one to the food blog party. It would be a fun little hobby. No one would need to know about it. She called it The Wednesday Chef.

Luisa kept her blog strictly anonymous at first, but to her immense surprise, soon had more readers than she'd ever expected. Before long, The Wednesday Chef was being mentioned in national newspapers, Luisa was making friends with other food bloggers and connecting with readers. One day, Luisa decided it was time to drop the act and own up to her hobby that had come to dominate whatever free time she had.

When the publisher of a publishing company approached Luisa about transitioning from book scouting to cookbook editing, it was the most logical next step. During her time at Stewart, Tabori & Chang, Luisa acquired and edited authors like Kim Boyce, Renato Poliafito and Matt Lewis, Jacques Torres, Alton Brown and Liana Krissoff.

As much as she loved living in New York, Luisa grew more and more homesick for Berlin. She missed it so much that she found herself incapable of committing to life in New York. This led to all sorts of complications and eventually Luisa decided to pull the plug on her life in New York. If that sounds dramatic, it was! You can read all about it in her first book, My Berlin Kitchen, which she sold in a pre-empt to Viking two months before moving to Berlin.

At Home At Last

In Berlin, Luisa became a full-time writer, publishing My Berlin Kitchen in the fall of 2012. In the book, she wrote about her childhood in Berlin, the homesickness she battled through cooking, trying to find her way as an adult, and how she finally came full circle by moving back home and falling in love. Luisa filled the book with her favorite recipes from her three countries: roasted Brussels sprouts and braised chicken from New York, bracioline siciliane and chickpea soup from summers in Italy, and Pflaumenmus and Rote Grütze from her kitchen in Berlin. The book was also published in Germany, Poland, Holland and Brazil.

The same year that My Berlin Kitchen was published, Luisa and her husband Max had a little boy named Hugo. Luisa became the food columnist for Harper's Bazaar Germany (the only Harper's Bazaar publication worldwide with a food column, incidentally), then wrote another book, a cookbook called Classic German Baking, and dreamed that she had a second child named Bruno. A dream that, like magic, came true.

Classic German Baking, published in 2016, is a rigorously tested collection of beloved German, Austrian and Swiss baking recipes. From classics like Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and Sachertorte to lesser known gems like Swabian Seelen and traditional yeasted Gugelhupf, Luisa's goal was to gather together the best of the baking tradition from German-speaking countries where home baking is still a huge part of everyday life. Classic German Baking was considered one of the best baking books of the year by both the Washington Post and the New York Times. Search the #classicgermanbaking hashtag on Instagram to see all the wonderful things being baked from the book across the world.

In 2024, Luisa published Classic German Cooking, a collection of more than 100 of the best, most essential everyday recipes of German and Austrian home cooks, like Rinderrouladen and Hühnerfrikassee, authentic Viennese Gulasch and Alpine Germknödel. Sprinkled with both personal stories and historical insights, Classic German Cooking will leave you with a well-rounded understanding of the cuisine and its lasting influence.

Luisa's writing on everything from food to motherhood has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. the Guardian, Cup of Jo, Food52, Publisher's Weekly, The Kitchn, and Epicurious, among many other places.

Luisa also works as a translator (from German to English) for clients like The Experiment, Netflix, Warner Bros and Axel Springer GmbH. She has worked as a freelance editor and proofreader for companies like Hyperion and Workman, and has done a few cookbook Americanizations. Luisa has taught food writing classes in Berlin and at the Anna Tasca Lanza School in Sicily.