Cat Cora

Cat Cora is an American chef, restaurateur, author and television personality best known for making history as the first female Iron Chef on Food Network’s Iron Chef America. Cora was adopted as an infant and raised in a Greek-American family where cooking was central to family life. She earned a bachelor’s degree in exercise physiology and biology from the University of Southern Mississippi before graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1995.

Cora began her culinary career working with chefs including Anne Rosenzweig and Larry Forgione before training in France with Michelin-starred chefs Georges Blanc and Roger Vergé. She later became chef de cuisine at Bistro Don Giovanni in Napa Valley. She made her TV debut in 1999 as cohost of Melting Pot and became the first female Iron Chef on Iron Chef America in 2005. In 2006, she received Bon Appétit’s Teacher of the Year Award and later became the first woman inducted into the American Academy of Chefs Culinary Hall of Fame. Her other TV credits include Around the World in 80 Plates, My Kitchen Rules and Family Food Fight.

Throughout her career, Cora has published cookbooks including Cat Cora’s Kitchen (2004), Cooking From the Hip (2007) and Classics With a Twist (2010) and has opened restaurants in the U.S. and abroad.

She has four sons with ex-wife Jennifer Cora: Zoran (born in 2003), Caje (born in 2007), Thatcher (born in 2009) and Nash (born in 2009). The couple married in 2013 and divorced in 2016. Cora married producer Nicole Ehrlich in 2018; Ehrlich filed for divorce in 2021.