Chef Iliana Regan earned her first Michelin star in 2014. It was a year after opening her celebrated Chicago restaurant, Elizabeth, which was named after her late sister. She went on to earn another five consecutive Michelin stars until she left Elizabeth in 2020.
She and her wife, Anna Hamlin, purchased the Milkweed Inn on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 2019. Nestled within a woodsy 270-acre spread, in the Hiawatha National Forest, the two host about a dozen guests who come to hike, fish, and forage. But the highlight is dining on Iliana Regan’s meals, composed of mostly foraged and locally-available food.
Her first memoir (yes, there are two), was long-listed in 2019 for the National Book Award. It had been 39 years since a chef attracted this kind of literary attention, when Julia Child won the award in 1980.
Burn The Place chronicles Iliana Regan’s Indiana farmhouse upbringing with parents and grandparents who taught her foraging, a love of cooking, and the skills that would eventually lead her to those six Michelin stars.
Her second book, Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir, was dubbed a “love letter to the land” by The Washington Post. It’s memoir. It’s field notes, and it’s a deep exploration of connections among the living things that inhabit earth – from mushrooms to wolves to birds to people.
Her most recent foraging expedition brought her to Wilmington, North Carolina where she mucked about the marsh with Fisherman Ana Shellem and good friend Vic Roberts, both of whom have appeared on CoastLine.
