Early and Personal Life
Zimmern was born and raised in New York City, to a Jewish family. He began his formal culinary training at the age of 14. He attended the Dalton School and graduated from Vassar College. Contributing to many of New York’s finest restaurants as either executive chef or general manager, he has also lectured on restaurant management and design at The New School for Social Research.
Owing to severe drug and alcohol addiction, Zimmern was homeless for about one year. During this period, he survived by stealing purses from cafes and selling the contents. In 1992 Zimmern moved to Minnesota, where he checked into the Hazelden Treatment Center for drug and alcohol addiction treatment, where he now volunteers. He later gained wide acclaim during his four and a half year tenure as executive chef of Café Un Deux Trois in Minneapolis's Foshay Tower. His menus received the highest ratings from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minnesota Monthly, and Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, as well as national publications. Zimmern left the daily restaurant operations in 1997.
Zimmern resides in Edina, Minnesota, with his wife and their son, Noah.
Read more about this topic: Andrew Zimmern
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, early, personal and/or life:
“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“when this life is from the body fled,
To see it selfe in that eternall Glasse,
Where time doth end, and thoughts accuse the dead,
Where all to come, is one with all that was;
Then living men aske how he left his breath,
That while he lived never thought of death.”
—Fulke Greville (1554–1628)