Partners
Considered one of the nation's leading authorities on Asian food, Bruce Cost
has devoted himself to this pursuit for over 30 years. He has demonstrated
cooking at Macy's New York, Food &
Wine's annual festival in Aspen and Greystone in Napa Valley, and was featured
on the Great Chefs, Great Cities TV series while living in San Francisco.
For years, Cost wrote features and a weekly food column for The San Francisco
Chronicle that also ran in The Washington Post. Cost's articles have appeared
in The New York Times Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Food &
Wine and Gourmet.
Mr. Cost is the author of three books: Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients (Morrow,
re-published in 2001 by HarperCollins), Ginger East to West (Addison-Wesley)
and Big Bowl Noodles and Rice (HarperCollins), and was part of the team that
did the first major update of The Joy of Cooking.
Called by Alice Waters in her introduction to Cost's Asian Ingredients book,
"one of the greatest cooks I have ever known," in 1989 Cost opened
the 4-star Monsoon Restaurant in San Francisco, where he was a two-time nominee
for a James Beard award as "Best Chef in California".
In 1995, he moved to Chicago and partnered with Lettuce Entertain You
Enterprises in creating the Big Bowl Restaurants, featuring casual Chinese and
Thai food. There are currently 8 Big
Bowls in Chicago, Minneapolis and Reston, Virginia.
In 2001, Cost and his Lettuce partners created the popular Wow Bao, 3 outlets featuring steamed buns the Chinese call bao. He was a founding partner of Shanghai Circus, currently called Big Bowl Express, take-away kiosks in the Byerly's supermarkets in Minnesota. Cost also created frozen products and bottled sauces to sell in these supermarkets under the Big Bowl label.
Cost has 3 children: Eliza, who is an Executive Producer of TV's Hollywood
Insider in Los Angeles and whose husband, Eric, won a Gold Medal for the U.S.
at the 2000 Olympics; Jennifer, an English professor at Mesa College in San
Diego; and Ben, a recent graduate of Lawrence University in Wisconsin, who is
studying and working in Shanghai.
Cost is an inveterate traveler who, with his son, Ben, has spent time in most
of the world's rainforests from Borneo to the Amazon, Vietnam, Thailand,
Malaysia, Australia, and has visited food markets throughout the world where he
enjoys tracking down and sampling new foods and ingredients.
Cost currently lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he is happily married to Kavi Reddy, a lawyer who works with famed trial lawyer, David Boies.
His most recent venture is Fresh Ginger, Ginger Ale by Bruce Cost, a young and growing company that features a bottled version of the drink he made and sold for years in restaurants in California and then at Big Bowl and Wow Bao.