Michael Aaron Gardiner

Michael Gardiner is a food writer and California attorney living in San Diego. He is a regular food writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune (San Diego’s paper of record) and regular restaurant reviewer for San Diego CityBeat (an alternative paper) as well as the monthly food columnist for L’Chaim San Diego Magazine and the primary writer for the San Diego Food & Travel Blog, www.sdfoodtravel.com. He has also staged in various high-end restaurant kitchens in the United States and Mexico and brings that back-of-the-house experience into his writing.

Gardiner is the author of Modern Kosher: Global Flavors, New Traditions In many ways, kosher food is the original fusion cuisine. Forced to adapt the application of their dietary laws to the foodstuffs available in these strange new lands in which they landed during the diaspora, the Jewish people engaged in a remarkably fertile exchange of culinary ideas with their hosts. What evolved in each case was a vibrant and new cuisine differing significantly from that which had gone before. Looking to the flavors of various Asian, Latin and Middle Eastern cultures – as well as contemporary technology and approaches – for inspiration, Modern Kosher.

While Gardiner is Jewish, he did not grow up in a Kosher environment. When his sister, Jacqueline, married an observant Conservative Jew—they kept a Kosher home—the rules at family gatherings changed: the food had to be Kosher. Determined that, the laws of Kashrut notwithstanding, the food at family celebrations would not be boring, Gardiner set about learning the Jewish dietary laws and what is possible within the parameters of those laws. Modern Kosher is the result of that process.