Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is a food and wine writer, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Dara Moskowitz was born and raised in New York City and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1988. She got her start in the world of food as a dishwasher. She graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1992. She lives with her family in Minneapolis and is a senior writer for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

Originally focusing on fiction writing, she won two Minnesota State Arts Board grants, a fellowship from the Loft McKnight foundation, won the Tamarack Award in 1994, and was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for the anthology American Fiction, Volume Nine: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Authors. Her primary outlet for food writing from 1995 to 2008 was in the City Pages, a Minneapolis-St. Paul alternative weekly owned by Village Voice Media. Currently, she works for MSP Communications, where she writes for both Delta Sky Magazine as a travel writer and Mpls St. Paul Magazine with a restaurant column, profiles, and feature stories. She has been nominated for eleven James Beard Awards for both her food and wine writing and has won five times; her most recent nomination was for an MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for “The Cheese Artist”. In both 2011 and 2013 she won the City and Regional Magazine Association Award as the nation’s best restaurant critic in a city magazine. She has also written for Gourmet Magazine, USA Today, Wine & Spirits, Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, and Saveur. Her writing has been included in five editions of Best Food Writing.