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Martha Stewart to keynote at the Restaurant Leadership Conference in April

The lifestyle expert and entrepreneur will share her perspective in a fireside chat

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

February 8, 2024

2 Min Read
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Celebrity entrepreneur and lifestyle maven Martha Stewart will headline the Restaurant Leadership Conference in Phoenix this April.

The founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will share her perspective on leadership in general and the restaurant industry in particular in a fireside chat at the event, which will be held April 14-17 at the J.W. Marriott Phoenix Desert Ridge Resort & Spa.

The Emmy Award-winning television show host and author of 99 books reaches more than 100 million people monthly through her magazines, shows, books, and home products, and has helped shape the tastes of generations of Americans — supermarkets have been known to set up special tables offering the ingredients needed for recipes Stewart shared that day on her popular television shows.

The former Wall Street stockbroker from Nutley, N.J., started a catering company in 1972 that grew into a thriving business based in Westport, Conn. She published her first book, Entertaining, ten years later, and founded Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in 1996. It expanded to include publications such as Martha Stewart Living, and Martha Stewart Weddings, and television shows such as “The Martha Living Show,” “The Martha Show,” and “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School.”

She expanded her audience even further in 2016 by collaborating with hip-hop artist and entertainer Snoop Dogg for “Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party,” which ran for two seasons on VH1.

She has worked on a wide range of consumer goods including furniture, lighting, home décor, housewares, organizational solutions, crafts, and CBD products.

Stewart also founded the Martha Stewart Center for Living at Mount Sinai in New York City, which provides outpatient clinical care and education focused on geriatric medicine and also coordinates healthy-aging research and practices.

The RLC is expected to bring around 2,000 restaurant leaders together to share their perspectives at a premier event for operators looking to grow their businesses.

For more information or to register, go to restaurantleadership.com

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected] 

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

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