Najmieh Khalili Batmanglij (, ) is an Iranian-American chef and cookbook author. Born in Tehran, she fled the Iranian Revolution in 1979, moving first to France, then the United States, building a career as a cookbook author as she went. Her first book, published in French, was called Ma Cuisine d’Iran (1984), followed by eight cookbooks in English, from Food of Life (1986) to Cooking in Iran (2018). The Washington Post hailed her in 2018 as "the grande dame of Iranian Cooking." Biography Najmieh Khalili was born in 1947 in Tehran, Imperial Iran (present-day Iran). She received her undergraduate and master's degrees in education in the United States. She returned to Iran after her education in America but was forced into exile in 1979, because of the Iranian Revolution. She and her husband fled to Vence, France as refugees, where she studied cooking and began translating her mother's recipes into French resulting in her first cookbook, Ma Cuisine d'Iran. In the 1980s Batmanglij permanently relocated to Washington, DC where she wrote her celebrated book, Food of Life. After her move to the United States, which was near the time of the Iran hostage crisis and she faced discrimination, as a result she needed to publish her own work. Alongside her husband Mohammad, they started their own publishing house. After the success of that book, Batmanglij went on to write five more cookbooks, including From Persia to Napa: Wine at the Persian Table, which won a Gourmand Cookbook Award. and Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey, which The New York Times compared to reading "a good novel—once you start, it's hard to put down." Batmanglij has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show and also teaches Persian cooking. She is a member of Les Dames d'Escoffier, a society of professional women involved in the food, wine, and hospitality industries. For many years she has taught at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in Napa Valley, California during the World of Flavors Conference. Honors and awards On February 15, 2013, in his weekly article for the Guardian newspaper, Yotam Ottolenghi included a recipe that was inspired by a recipe in Food of Life, about which he said: "One of the most exciting cookbooks I've seen in a while, Food Of Life: Ancient Persian And Modern Iranian Cooking And Ceremonies, by Najmieh Batmanglij–I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in Iran's