Iron Chef Cat Cora – on Success, Style and Paying It Forward 

A Nod to Mentors, Culinary Roots and Personal Style


Best known as the first woman to be named Iron Chef, Cora calls winning the Food Network competition in 2005 “the tipping point of my career.”  “It was a chance for me to show that women in kitchens could cook as hard and fast as men. And it just gave me a platform that was amazing,” Cora says. “I was able to inspire and create aspirational moments for young girls out there, women out there, showing them that it's never too late.”  

Cora had heard Child’s book tour with food writer Marion Cunningham and winemaker Robert Mondavi would stop in a town an hour and a half from where she lived in Jackson, Mississippi.


“And I said to my mom and grandmother, ‘You gotta take me,’” recounts Cora, who came from a family of restaurateurs and had all of Child’s cookbooks. At the book signing, it was Child who encouraged Cora to apply to the Culinary Institute of America. After that fateful first meeting with the famed “Joy of Cooking” author, Cora took Child’s advice.  “I put my application in the next day.”

After she was accepted, she crossed paths with Child again while studying at the institute on a scholarship. “[Part of my scholarship experience] was to go spend a day with Julia in her kitchen in Cambridge, and watch her film the Master Chef series. So I got a lot of time with her one-on-one then,” she says. “It blossomed into a really beautiful mentorship for years.” 

Since then, Cora has become a mentor to women and young chefs. Her mentorship program Women’s Empowerment Culinary Internship Program—launched through her nonprofit Chefs for Humanity and open to culinary students including her alma mater—immerses participants in a full week of hands-on learning at Cora’s restaurant Mesa Burger. The week-long internships are “soup to nuts,” Cora says, offering experience in running service from front to back of the house, business management and media training for a 360 experience.

“It’s completely entrepreneurial from start to finish. Then at the end, we cook together. … They can ask me anything,” says Cora. Program mentees have gone on and “done amazing things in the world,” she proudly notes, adding that “it gives them this confidence that they might not have had.”

Cora grew up in the South learning to cook in a Greek family, with a mother who taught her Greek staples like spanakopita and dolmades (“I was working with phyllo dough when I was 7 or 8 years old,” she shares), and a grill-master father who taught her smoked meats, briskets and ribs, Southern barbecue-style.

A Full Plate of Culinary Enterprises


As an ambitious restaurateur, media personality and serial entrepreneur, Cora is constantly cooking projects up across every burner—expanding restaurants, building brand partnerships, designing a cutlery line and pitching new TV shows. 

She’s always looking for solutions to make life—whether it’s getting dressed or getting dinner on the table—more seamless. As one of her latest ventures, the mom of six recently took a crack at solving the everyday dinner dilemma to make meal time frictionless with a food delivery program through CookUnity in Los Angeles (and plans to expand to kitchens in New York and more cities).

Cora shares children with her first wife and her ex-wife and business partner, music exec Nicole Ehrlich, blending a family that includes four sons of her own and two stepsons from Ehrlich’s prior relationship. With a big family and the bulk of domestic labor falling on women, Cora knows life gets hectic. 

“I have six teenage sons … there’s a milestone popping off every single week—whether it's someone getting their permit, getting their license, or college application[s].” For Cora, cooking starts early in the home kitchen. “My boys are not leaving the house without knowing how to cook,” she states matter‑of‑factly. Cooking isn’t just a chore—it’s an education that builds confidence and independence.

That philosophy inspired the Little Kitchen Academy, another Chef Cora partnership, with IKEA and Whole Foods. The Montessori-style cooking classes for kids aged three and up often sell out, and are expanding across the U.S. and globally. 

Today, Cora and Ehrlich run Global Chef Enterprises together, the entity that houses Cora’s culinary ventures, from the partnership business to the mentorship program that gives aspiring young chefs insight into the culinary world. 

While Global Chef Enterprises is big business and Cora has been recognized for lifetime achievement and in culinary halls of fame, she never forgets the power of meaningful mentorship to get her here. When asked what she thinks her mentor Julia Child would’ve said about her success if she were living today, Cora doesn’t hesitate. “Her biggest request was that I pay it forward,” she says. “And so I did. And I never forgot that.”