About Andrew Loves

Growing up, I wanted to be a chef. Food is in my blood. My great-grandparents owned bakeries and my Nana passed the tradition down, teaching me how to bake. My grandfather was a butcher, and my mom taught me the basics of cooking.

It wasn’t a surprise when I said I wanted to go to culinary school—but my parents didn’t want that life for me. At 18 though, I had the opportunity to move to Paris for the summer and work in a bakery—so off I went.

The experience was incredible, but all good things end. I came back, went to college and got a business degree. I had objectively cool internships to figure out what I wanted to do with my life — from working at an embassy to a law firm that restored ownership of art plundered by Nazis — but food kept calling me back.

Eventually, I started working in marketing for a restaurant group. But since I loved to cook, as much as I may want to eat a full cake, I would instead bring the recipes I was testing to the office. After a few months of doing that, I moved over to their R&D team helping to develop new concepts, and refresh menus at their existing restaurants.

While there, I learned what I loved—and didn’t—about cooking. I want to make the best. I want to take people on a journey and see them enjoy my food. I didn’t want to be behind the scenes or be tied to the commercial realities of hitting a specific price point.

So I left the group. I started selling pastries and cooking for private dinner, as a side hustle, but I took a job in eCommerce, which had me traveling constantly—New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh, Jaipur, Jodhpur… you get the idea. Being a foodie though, I would do research before any trip, so I could try the best bites wherever I was. I tracked everything in a spreadsheet: restaurant name, price point, cuisine type, address, what to order, when to go - I even added my notes after visiting. Friends and family started asking for my list, and then their friends, and their friends’ friends —until one day I sent it out 60 times. It was too much.

That’s when I created Andrew Loves—a place where people could see where I was eating and, good or bad, what I honestly thought. Well that resonated with people, and soon I had 10K followers, then 25K, then 50K, and so on. It was never supposed to be anything more than a way to help people find good food - but it turned into something so much more.