Skip to main content

Zahra Tangorra

Biography

Zahra Tangorra

Zahra Tangorra is a chef, restaurant consultant and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the chef and owner behind the cult favorite Italian American popup Zaza Lazagna and also the beloved former Cobble Hill restaurant Brucie. Brucie and Zaza have been featured in multiple publications and TV shows, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, TIME, The Daily News, Eater, Grub Street, Glamour, MTV, "The Martha Stewart Show" and ABC News. Zahra’s writing has been featured in New York Magazine, Lenny Letter, Speaking Broadly Zine and Epicurious.

Zahra Tangorra

Books by Zahra Tangorra

Extra Sauce: The Good, the Bad, and the Onions
by Zahra Tangorra - Memoir, Nonfiction

At 22 years old, Zahra Tangorra was trying on adulthood and attempting to find herself when a harrowing, near-death experience stopped her in her tracks. It felt like a twisted version of a second chance. Who am I? She asked herself. What do I love? The answers started coming to her. Stuffed shells and giant meatballs at J&J’s, the Italian red sauce joint of her Long Island childhood. Her mother's chocolate mousse pie and her father's sweet and savory pea soup. The loves of Zahra's life, the people and places and experiences that made her her, the relationships both loving and fraught --- they were all, for better and sometimes worse, inextricably bound up with food.