Luke Barr is the author of the New York Times bestseller Provence, 1970 and his most recent book, Ritz & Escoffier. He is currently writing a social and cultural history of 1970s French cooking. He is also co-writing The Hunt for History with Nathan Raab, a memoir of Raab’s adventures in the rare document and artifact business (Scribner).
Before turning to writing full time in 2015, Barr was the features director at Travel + Leisure magazine where he edited many of the magazine’s high profile writers. Before that, Barr was the executive editor of Gear, a men’s fashion magazine, and before that, a senior editor at Brill’s Content, which covered the news and media industries.

He was the founder and editor of KGB, a New York City-based pop culture magazine, and has written over the years for magazines including Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, GQ, and Spy.
Barr graduated from Harvard College with a degree in English literature and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, architect Yumi Moriwaki, and their two daughters.

Luke Barr will present his argument for the seminal role that two idiosyncratic men, Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier, played in the history of the restaurant. His research on the subject resulted in his latest book Ritz & Escoffier: the Hotelier, the Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class (Clarkson Potter/Crown, 2018).
He will talk a bit about his great aunt, M.F.K. Fisher, and her influence and inspiration for him as he worked on his first book, Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste (Clarkson Potter/Crown, 2013), and about how his current project, a history of nouvelle cuisine, tentatively titled Les Enfants Terribles: How a Band of Outlaw Chefs Created Nouvelle Cuisine and Revolutionized Modern Cooking (Dutton);, is a sequel of sorts to both of his previous books. He will discuss his various research approaches, depending on the material, and more generally the way that food and food history illuminate the present