Chef Anne Rosenzweig is one of those lucky people who make it all look easy. While most chefs spend their whole careers striving, sweating, and schmoozing for one elusive New York Times three-star review, Anne Rosenzweig has two, one for each of her East Side restaurants: the elegant Arcadia and the more casual Lobster Club. Not only has she emerged from the male-dominated restaurant world as one of the most prominent chefs in the country, she also has a family. And still, she somehow manages to find the time to give back to her community, supporting a wide variety of causes including City Meals on Wheels (feeding the home-bound elderly), and Kids for Kids (assisting pediatric AIDS patients). Rosenzweig helped create the Fresh Start program for New York City prison inmates, and she assisted the U.S. Department of Agriculture School Lunch Program with their menu development (helping, one supposes, to change their minds about ketchup's vegetable status). Rosenzweig also conducts internships at Arcadia for students from New York City public schools. And, as one of the first chefs to identify her menu as "innovative American," she uses the ever-growing strength of her name to help educate people about rich food heritage of the United States (she even helped the Clintons select the White House chef).

Perhaps Rosenzweig is so willing to involve herself in her community since her formal education was in anthropology. It was during her graduate fieldwork in Africa, Nepal, and India that she learned to be passionate about food, since living and working in remote areas made cooking, for the first time in this born-and-bred New Yorker's life, a necessity. She also found that cooking was a way to communicate with people whose language she couldn't speak. Rosenzweig recalls the awe she felt watching people with the scantiest resources create "very delicious food".

"It's easy", Rosenzweig admits, "to take caviar and foie gras and make them taste good, but it's a lot more of a challenge to use humbler ingredients, in combination with the luxurious to create something new," like her duck hearts stuffed with foie gras, or corn meal cakes topped with caviar. She put her philosophy into action when she opened Arcadia in 1985. As one of the first restaurants to combine American home cooking with haute-cuisine technique (which Rosenzweig learned after staging in classical French restaurants around the city), Arcadia became renown for its intrepid interpretation of classic themes from the American culinary traditions. It also became a great favorite with food lovers from around the world.

After ten successful years with Arcadia, Rosenzweig opened the Lobster Club twenty blocks north (on East 80th Street). She decided to open this new restaurant because she wanted a venue where she could do things differently from the courtly and adult Arcadia. That she wanted to have fun is evident in the menu, with cunningly conceived dishes such as her free-range snails on lobster polenta, matzo brei with wild mushrooms, and lobster congee with deep-fried devil dumpling. "I wanted the Lobster Club to be the kind of place people would feel comfortable coming in two or three times a week," Rosenzweig says, then adds, grinning, "if they could get in, that is."