Jack's Wife Freda: Cooking From New York's West Village

Dean and Maya Jankelowitz are the co-owners of Jack’s Wife Freda, the wildly popular pair of identically named restaurants in New York City’s Greenwich Village and Soho neighborhoods. They have two children and live in downtown Manhattan. Julia Jaksic attended Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. She cooked at several restaurants there, before moving to Manhattan to work with Missy Robins at the SoHo Grand Hotel. She became Chef of Employees Only in 2006, where she is currently Executive Chef and consultant. She works as a consultant on various restaurants in New York City, Brooklyn, and with the Jack’s Wife Freda restaurants in SoHo and the West Village. Jaksic specializes in fresh, simple flavors and slow food cooking. She learned butchering from her father, who worked in New York’s Meatpacking District in the 1970s, and is producing a documentary inspired by her childhood in butcher shops about the production of food in America. Jaksic lives in New York and Nashville, Tennessee.