Nancy Silverton

Current Company

Mozza Restaurant Group — Founder & Chef

The Godmother of American Bread

Nancy Silverton's founding of La Brea Bakery in 1989 was a catalytic moment in American food culture — one of the first commercial bakeries to produce European-style artisanal breads using natural starters, long fermentation times, and traditional techniques that had largely disappeared from American baking. The sourdough loaves, ciabattas, and olive breads that emerged from La Brea's ovens were a revelation to Los Angeles diners accustomed to the soft, flavorless commercial breads that dominated American supermarkets, and the bakery's success helped launch the artisanal bread movement that would spread across the country over the following decades. Silverton's bread was not just better than what was available — it was a different category of product entirely, demonstrating that bread could be a complex, flavorful food worthy of the same attention and appreciation that Americans were beginning to devote to wine, cheese, and coffee.

Her earlier work at Campanile, the influential Los Angeles restaurant she opened with her then-husband Mark Peel in 1989, had already established her reputation as one of the most talented chefs in the city. But it was La Brea Bakery that established her legacy: the bakery grew from a small retail operation into a wholesale business supplying restaurants and grocery stores across the country, and its eventual sale made Silverton one of the few chefs to build a genuinely scalable food business without sacrificing the quality that made the product special in the first place.

The Mozza Empire and the Art of Italian Simplicity

Silverton's Mozza restaurant group — Pizzeria Mozza, Osteria Mozza, and chi SPACCA, all located on the same Highland Avenue block in Hollywood — represents the culmination of her culinary philosophy: that the best cooking is defined not by complexity but by the quality of ingredients and the precision of technique. The mozzarella bar at Pizzeria Mozza, which showcases dozens of preparations of fresh burrata, mozzarella di bufala, and ricotta, became one of the most imitated restaurant concepts in America. The pizzas, cooked in a custom-built wood-burning oven and topped with combinations that range from classic margherita to adventurous pairings of squash blossoms and tomato, set a new standard for what American pizza could be — not New York thin crust or Chicago deep dish but a distinctly Californian interpretation of the Neapolitan tradition.

chi SPACCA, the meat-focused third restaurant in the Mozza complex, extended Silverton's range into the realm of whole-animal butchery and fire cooking, featuring massive cuts of beef, lamb, and pork prepared over wood fire with an almost primal intensity. The James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef that Silverton received in 2014 recognized not just the quality of any single restaurant but the cumulative achievement of a career that transformed multiple categories of American cooking — bread, pizza, and Italian cuisine — while maintaining an uncompromising commitment to craft. At an age when many chefs are stepping back from the stove, Silverton continues to cook, teach, and open new restaurants, driven by the same passion for ingredients and technique that produced her first sourdough loaf over three decades ago.