About the author

Kathy Biehl’s professional association with food began at the counter of a McDonald’s in Dallas, Texas, where she later worked as a cocktail waitress in the restaurant that pioneered the margarita machine. She got her start as a food writer walking into a bar… literally.

She has spent some 30 years being paid to eat, drink, and type up her observations. Her career began in Houston and coincided with its culinary scene rising to national prominence; her base of operations expanded to New York City and, eventually, the entire country. 

For more than a decade she reviewed restaurants for The Houston Business Journal, Houston Press, Time Out New York (including its first dining guide), and a slew of online directories and guides. She also contributed cover stories to Houston’s dining magazine My Table, reported on wine for Publix Grape and wrote long-running food news columns for the doctor’s travel and leisure magazine Diversion and the legal research journal LLRX.com. She is the editrix and primary writer of the zine Ladies’ Fetish & Taboo Society Compendium of Urban Anthropology and its companion blogs. 

Her food writing has won awards from the Association of Food Journalists and Houston Press Club, as well as the title “Pseudo Food Xpert,” bestowed by a review subject she’d caught impersonating a competitor. Informal honors include triggering the largest week of business a cafe had had in decades of operation and serving as litigation evidence, after a review tipped off a prominent chef that a former employee had walked off with his signature dishes.

Kathy is also an attorney and primary author of The Lawyer’s Guide to Internet Research (Scarecrow Press, 2000); a stage and film actress best known for the dowager role in the first-ever revival of the Marx Brothers’ earliest Broadway musical I’ll Say She Is; and a professional astrologer whose forecasts appear at EmpowermentUnlimited.net, OMTimes.com and the Professional Aquarian YouTube channel.

She is a contributor to Your Guide to Self-Discovery: Twenty Ways to Find the True You (Llewellyn 2023).

Follow her on Instagram for food musings, astrological forecasts and self-amusement.

View her portfolio at Muckrack

Listen to her interview on The Old Dogs Podcast

Fun Facts

• Merriam-Webster quoted her food nostalgia essay to illustrate its Word of the Day for October 22, 2021.
• She has been called all of the names at the top of this page (three in print, and all by men).
• She once tested a pal’s potential boyfriend with a cut-glass party platter of circus peanuts, Little Debbie Snack Cakes, Snoballs, Twinkies, and Hostess Cupcakes. (He flunked.)
• She’s explored Jersey Shore restaurants in a van with an eight-foot-long hot dog on the roof (aka the Munchmobile)
• She makes killer sea salted chocolate caramels.
• Her favorite ice cream flavors are pistachio, Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and her own Sweet Baby Jesus Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout.