Cara Mangini

Cara Mangini is a San Francisco-based chef, restaurateur, and award-winning cookbook author on a mission to put vegetables at the center of the American plate. She is a two-time IACP Award winner, a 2017 James Beard Award finalist, and the author of The Vegetable Butcher and The Vegetable Eater. The Culinary Institute of America and the EAT Foundation have named her one of the top 50 plant-forward chefs in the world.

The Vegetable Butcher is Cara Mangini's debut cookbook, published in 2016, that applies the skills and precision of traditional butchery to vegetables — showing how to select, break down, and cook more than 100 vegetables for their best possible use. It won two IACP Cookbook Awards for Single Subject and People's Choice, was a 2017 James Beard Award finalist, and was named the number two cookbook of all time by Southern Living, behind only Joy of Cooking. The New York Times called it enlightening. The Washington Post called it an encyclopedic guide full of revelations.

Yes. Her second cookbook, The Vegetable Eater: The New Playbook for Vegetarian Cooking, was published in 2024 and won the IACP Award for Best Book of the Year in the Single Subject category. Where The Vegetable Butcher focused on technique and preparation, The Vegetable Eater focuses on turning vegetables into complete, satisfying meals that work for vegetarians and omnivores alike.

Little Eater was Cara Mangini's produce-inspired restaurant and artisanal foods company in Columbus, Ohio, which she founded in 2013. The Washington Post named it one of the 50 best places in the world to eat your vegetables. The restaurant had multiple locations in Columbus before Mangini relocated to California. It remains one of the most recognized vegetable-forward dining concepts in the country.

Mangini grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and worked at top culinary destinations in New York City and Napa Valley before earning her culinary arts degree from the National Gourmet Institute in New York. She has worked at the James Beard House and served as a sous chef at New York's Culinary Loft. Before pursuing food professionally she attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and spent nearly a decade as an executive in the New York beauty and fashion industry. She became one of the first official vegetable butchers at Eataly in New York City, a role that directly inspired her first cookbook and culinary identity.

Mangini's cooking is vegetable-forward and produce-driven, rooted in her deep belief that seasonal vegetables are one of life's greatest culinary pleasures. Her approach draws on her Bay Area upbringing, her Napa Valley experience, and decades of building relationships with local farmers. Her food is flavor-first and accessible without being simple, designed to make vegetables the most compelling thing on the table rather than a supporting act.

Napa Valley is one of the most produce-rich regions in the world, and Mangini is one of the chefs most singularly equipped to cook from it at the highest level. Her residency at Rotation Napa puts the region's extraordinary seasonal bounty at the center of the menu in a way that aligns naturally with the open-hearth kitchen and farm-driven philosophy that defines the restaurant. For diners who want to experience what Napa Valley's agricultural abundance actually tastes like when prepared by a world-recognized authority on vegetables, her residency is the most direct path available.

Cara Mangini holds a chef residency at Rotation Napa in September 2026. Rotation is located at Oxbow Public Market in downtown Napa, California. Rotation Napa is Napa Valley's only monthly rotating chef residency, bringing nationally recognized culinary talent to an intimate open-hearth dining room for one month at a time. Reservations are available through the Rotation Napa website.