Andy Baraghani

Andisheh "Andy" Baraghani (, born November 27, 1989) is an American chef and food writer.

Baraghani's first job as a teenager was at the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. He moved across the United States to study at New York University and work in New York City restaurants before transitioning into a career in media in 2013. Following a brief stint as a food editor at Tasting Table, he joined Bon Appétit in 2015 as a senior food editor and soon became a frequent presenter on the publication's YouTube channel.

Baraghani left Bon Appétit in 2021 to work on a cookbook, The Cook You Want to Be (2022), which contains recipes and essays that cover his personal life and career. The book won a James Beard Award.

Early life Baraghani His parents had immigrated from Iran to Berkeley in 1977, a year before the Iranian Revolution. When he was young, he often experimented with various foods and played with a Fisher-Price kitchen, his favorite toy as a child. As a teenager, he worked his first job at the Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, In his time at the restaurant working under Alice Waters, whom he regards as his "culinary idol", he learned cooking technique and how to be agile and "think methodically." One particular experience Baraghani recalls is when he cried after he could not understand what Waters asked him in French. With musicians Cupcakke and Ella Mai, Baraghani and Baz held cooking demonstrations at the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco in 2019. In early 2020, the LGBTQ magazine Out published a profile of Baraghani that dubbed him "the internet boyfriend of our dreams". Baraghani himself was accused of microaggressions toward a female Korean American coworker. A few days later, he posted a statement to Instagram in which he criticized the publication's workplace culture and apologized for the ways he had "undermined" and "hurt" BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) coworkers, particularly a "former coworker". He continued working at the publication for another year, unlike some coworkers who resigned at the time in protest. Speaking with the Financial Times in 2022, he explained that leaving Bon Appétit was "a privilege I didn't feel I had" because of his middle-class background and the large amount of student debt he had accrued. He departed the publication in August 2021 to work on a cookbook. According to The Mercury News, it "features a wide range of veg-forward, flavor-packed and often unexpected dishes" as well as dishes he ate in his childhood such as aush reshteh, a stew, and chelo (pilaf) with tahdig (scorched rice).

In a 2023 interview, Baraghani stated he was planning to write his second book and start a project to produce city guides for worldwide destinations.

Personal life Baraghani is gay. whom he met while they were employed by Condé Nast. Pollock has worked as an executive of Architectural Digest and West Elm, a brand of houseware stores. They met in 2017, and after a period of "flirty friendship," they began dating. Pollock proposed in March 2023, and just over a year later, they married in New York.

Baraghani stated in a Bon Appétit article that he had only worked in a kitchen with one other man who was openly gay, despite cooking in "male-led" kitchens through his career, and felt as though kitchens "weren't exactly environments that encouraged me to come out" due to cultural norms of the profession.