Danielle Alvarez is a Sydney based chef, recipe developer and cookbook author. Feeding people delicious, seasonal, responsibly sourced food and teaching people how to make the same delicious food for themselves is her purpose in life.  

She learned about the central role that food plays in our lives as a child cooking alongside her mother and grandmother.  After earning a degree in art history she enrolled in culinary school  and never looked back, working at the famed The French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley, and the seminal Chez Panisse in Berkeley, led by Alice Waters, who is largely credited with beginning what we now call “farm-to-table” cooking. There she learnt about responding to the seasons and trusting her intuition to cook with a menu that changed daily, and found her confidence as a cook, doing everything from cooking over fire, making pasta and butchering fish and whole animals.  

She moved to Sydney in 2014 to head up Paddington restaurant Fred’s, where she continued those practices and the farm-to-table philosophy and quickly earned critical acclaim.

In 2020, she wrote her first book, Always Add Lemon, and in 2021 and 2022 she co-hosted a TV show, The Good Food Kitchen, with Adam Liaw.

Following six years at the helm of Fred’s, Danielle pressed pause on restaurant life, and wrote her second book, Recipes for a Lifetime of Beautiful Cooking. She continues to be a regular contributor to Good Weekend Magazine.

In September 2023 Danielle was appointed Culinary Director of the private event spaces of the Sydney Opera House where she writes menus and curates special ticketed food events.