In a few words:

  • Cassoulet ranks as my favorite food. Dark chocolate is a close second. I've never wanted to taste tofu.

  • I developed a cassoulet obsession. So much so that I had to write a book about it. It only took me 10 years to understand why.

  • I am a regular contributor to the Washington Post and Forbes.com. I also write for the New York Times, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Departures, and Edible Magazines, among others.

  • I've recently started writing in my native language, French! So far my articles have appeared in Le Figaro, Histoire Magazine, and frenchmorning.com.

  • One of my favorite projects was to co-author Daniel Boulud's Daniel, My French Cuisine.

  • My best news in 2020 was winning a New York Press Club Journalism Award for Travel Writing in a newspaper category.

  • I worked as a recipe tester for several cookbooks.

  • New York City is home. For now.

  • I was born in Geneva, Switzerland during the fireworks at a mid-summer festival and grew up between Paris and Lake Geneva.

Bio

Sylvie Bigar’s poignant food memoir, Cassoulet Confessions; Food, France, Family and the Stew that Saved my Soul (Hardie Grant, 2022) skillfully spans the line between generational drama and culinary obsession. When Bigar, an award-winning food and travel writer, was handed an apparently anodyne assignment, to write about the history of cassoulet, France’s ancestral bean and meat stew, she couldn’t have known that this trip would lead her worlds away from her upper-crust upbringing in French Switzerland, launching a cosmic reconciliation with her own identity, her dark and dramatic family history, and the very essence of her soul.  

In 2023, the French government awarded Bigar the knight insignia in the Order of Agricultural Merit for her contribution to French gastronomy. Based in New York City, she is fluent in French, English, and Italian. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Food & Wine, Forbes.com, Saveur, Bon Appetit, Food Arts, Departures, Travel & Leisure, Town & Country, National Geographic Traveler, Gotham, Hamptons, Time Out New York, Air Canada, Passport Magazine, Narratives, Southampton Press, and New York Resident, for which she has also served as food editor. In French, Sylvie has contributed to Le Figaro Magazine, Histoire Magazine, her hometown newspaper Le Temps, and FrenchMorning.com.

Bigar won a New York Press Club Journalism Award for her Washington Post article, Her uncle died with the French Resistance, and she had to visit the spot, in which she retraced the last days of her mother’s brother through the Vercors Mountains of France. Departures magazine's Hunting Gooseneck Barnacles on Vancouver Island was awarded the bronze prize from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation for Best Culinary Travel, and the Washington Post’s  French Cassoulet, an Obsession boils over  received the gold Travelers' Tales Solas Award for Best Travel Writing.

Bigar co-authored Chef Daniel Boulud's definitive and personal cookbook, Daniel: My French Cuisine, published by Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, as well as Living Art: Style Your Home with Flowers with floral artist and designer Olivier Giugni, published by Atria Books. Her New York Times essay about Aimé Césaire, Beneath Martinique's Beauty, Guided by a Poet was published in Footsteps, a curated collection of the New York Times travel column, exploring iconic authors' relationships to landmarks and cities around the world.

Always seeking the most rewarding experiences to share with gourmands and globetrotters alike, Bigar's many adventures have led her to explore the childhood home and native French province of Colette, her favorite author, the apple orchards of Ireland, the banks of the Oum Er-Rbia River in Morocco, the remote Swiss village of Mund with its seductive saffron, the Austro-Hungarian culinary revival in Prague, and Southwestern France on a long-time quest for the perfect cassoulet.

Bigar's palate was put to work as a recipe tester for New York Times food writer Florence Fabricant's three cookbooks: Park Avenue Potluck, Volumes I and II, and The New York Restaurant Cookbook (all published by Rizzoli). She divides her time between New York, Bridgehampton and her favorite haunts in Europe, always looking out for the next new flavor. 

Bigar is at work on an historical novel inspired by her uncle’s short life, from 1918 São Paulo to the Paris of the 1930s and then the War.