19 Food Network Stars' Personal Websites, Ranked

The Food Network doesn't need my praise, but it can have all of it. The TV programming, the print magazine, the shining stars broadcast into our homes for the past 25 years—this brand is rock-solid and always finds new ways to entertain and educate us. Even when it's terrifying us.

Food Network stars are a genre unto themselves, each occupying their own niche within the greater ecosystem. From the visually distinctive to the shrewdly opportunistic, these celebrity chefs captivate us for different reasons. So how do they encapsulate all that personality and translate it to their personal websites? Not well, it turns out. Here's a ranking of each TV chef's web presence, from the frontrunners to the 404s.

Country singer Trisha Yearwood brought her already immense star power to the Food Network when she landed there in 2012 with Trisha's Southern Kitchen. So it's kind of amazing that her personal website, trishayearwood.com, has virtually no SEO sway to speak of. It was buried so far down in Google results that I had to take a stab at manually typing in the URL, hoping I wasn't about to be redirected to something horrible. In a way, I was: This website is a rather unpleasant crop of sponsorships stitched together in nonsensical order. Instead of recipes, you're served ads for a line of branded Kroger dog food. Yearwood diehards might find something to enjoy here, but I'm afraid I didn't.

Uh-oh! SunnyAnderson.com has been corrupted! Has anyone told her? She deserves better than this. (This is at least an amusing error to have uncovered, which makes it better than Trisha Yearwood's site. Sorry, Trish.)

Zakarian is a stylish fellow, and he brings a chic sensibility to every Food Network show he's a part of. Which makes it mildly disappointing that his personal website feels cold and clinical. There's nothing wrong with it, exactly; it just makes me feel like I'm about to request information about cruise packages. (Though that might be the fault of the Big Restaurant Bet advertising.)

Lest we forget, Ree rose to prominence as a blogger before the world knew her as a celebrity chef and Oklahoma tourism baron, so her website has the robust feel of a thriving food publication, not just a placeholder where a TV star dumps their portfolio and walks away. Ree's personal brand is unshakable, and you're either here for it or you're just... not.

Make no mistake, Ree has objectively built something impressive—it's just that since making the leap to the Food Network in 2010, the aesthetic of her mega-successful 2009 blog has seemed forever trapped in 2009. In 2022, perusing thepioneerwoman.com feels to me like strolling through the aisles of a Jo-Ann Fabrics on a Sunday afternoon, buzzy fluorescent lights and all.

If I had a whole family to feed, I'd probably find the recipes indispensable—they're the foundation upon which Ree built her empire, after all—but as it stands, I'd rather traverse her recipe catalog in the more functional confines of the Food Network's website.

Powered by Squarespace? How fitting—the official Sandra Lee website, just like Sandra Lee's patented mode of cooking, is semi-homemade!

The site has easily navigable recipes and entertaining advice whose whole vibe feels very Better Homes & Gardens. Nothing offensive, but nothing revelatory—a perfectly functional hub for approachable cuisine. The About page is easily the most interesting part of the whole site, functionally serving as a slide deck for why you should book Lee for speaking engagements. Her "E-Score Appeal and Likeability" is listed as remarkably high, and a word cloud prominently describes her as both "attractive" and "beautiful." It's not often we think about our favorite TV chefs as being broken down into quantifiable units of marketability.

Valerie Bertinelli has been a Food Network star for the better part of a decade, but because her acting career spans six decades, her personal website has a lot of juggling to do. There's a whole lot going on at valeriebertinelli.com, a rather disorienting hodgepodge of a storied TV career, multiple memoirs, cookbooks, and cooking shows made only slightly more coherent by a "Legacy" page broken down by decade.

The best thing about this site is that it's a clear demonstration of what Valerie herself is most proud of. A bafflingly long page chronicling her Saturday Night Live hosting gig is a standout, as is the endearing Proud Mom endorsement of her son Wolfgang "Wolfie" Van Halen's latest album. None of this is about food, but the Recipes page is pretty decent, so there's that.

This site delivers what it promises: a whole lot of Giada. It's really just photos and fluff, though; giadadelaurentiis.com is primarily a placeholder for linking out to the chef's far more active cooking and lifestyle site, Giadzy. That (superior) site's recipes are a handy resource—you can filter the results by meal, main ingredient, dietary restrictions, seasonality, or cooking time—and the Tips for Living section is full of stuff about how to be as hot as Giada. (The answer is olive oil and happiness, I think?)

Look, I'm not happy about Guy's middle-of-the-pack placement on these rankings, either. I would have ranked him number one if his official website weren't just a whole lot of empty calories. It looks flashy—in signature Guy fashion, the whole thing appears to be programmed out of distressed denim—but there's not a whole lot to click on or discover here.

For being the titan of the network, you'd think Guy would provide more gems for his loyal following to unearth. But I guess that might be asking too much of someone who already gives us all he's got. The Mayor of Flavortown leaves it all on the field, and that field is the Food Network's primetime programming block. While devoid of recipes for Trash Can Nachos, however, this site helpfully points readers toward a comprehensive directory of past Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives locations.

Why does tedallen.net go so hard? Why does every aspect of this go so hard? The Chopped host's personal website is essentially the most dressed-up Twitter feed of all time—you have to respect how much artistic photography and pure pizzazz surround a site where you don't get to read any recipes. Easter egg hunt: Find the contextless photo of Ted with Carrot Top!

Kardea Brown is a Gullah-Geechee chef and star of Delicious Miss Brown on the Food Network. There's not a whole lot to dig into on her website, but what's there is highly worthwhile. There's a link to information about Edisto Island, which is a cool nod to Brown's own roots, and a Featured Recipes page lists about 15 dishes, including Red Rice and Upside-Down Peach Cornbread Cake. But the best part of the site, hands down, are the comments below each recipe. Legions of Kardea Brown fans flock to every page to praise her cooking, share stories about their own attempts at each dish, and generally profess their adoration for her Food Network show. It's the cutest corner of the internet you're likely to read today.

Obviously, a URL doesn't get better than barefootcontessa.com. The most intriguing link in the top nav is, naturally, "Ina's World," which contains stray thoughts and promotions and can only be described as the world's briefest, most eclectic microblog entries. An endearing amount of exclamation points punctuate this clean little site, a site that, much like Ina herself, I can't imagine anyone could actively dislike. Plus, there's plenty of Jeffrey. 

Prepare yourselves for the most 1996 internet experience of your life—and I mean that in the best possible way. Though her approach to food might be exacting, Alex Guarnaschelli comes across as one of the more approachable, down-to-earth Food Network stars, and she has a personal website to match. The homepage greets you with "welcome to my website!" and invites you to "click and explore!" (God, remember back when websites used to greet us like that?) The recipe section, meanwhile, is designed for maximum utility, letting you click simple categories ("lunch," "appetizers") to reveal corresponding recipes. All in all, this site feels like a just slightly outdated gourmet kitchen. The fixtures aren't up-to-the-minute trendy, but their quality is undeniable.

Ace of Cakes might have ended its run over 10 years ago, but the Ace of Cakes, Duff Goldman, is still serving up friendly desserts at duff.com in between appearances on Food Network baking championships and Cameo. You can make or buy cake in equal measure here, and every recipe seems like it's aiming for the pocket of "family fun" rather than Instagrammability. My biggest complaint is that there's not enough of them.

"NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE." You have to see chefirvine.com to believe it. Part recipe hub and part tactical blog, Robert Irvine's personal website takes you inside the mind of a contract employee tasked with going inside the mind of a motivational speaker who happens to know how to cook. The "Tips and Advice" section is not to be missed; it's a strange hodgepodge of cooking advice (what to serve at Thanksgiving, Father's Day grilling gifts), restaurant advice (glove safety, menu pricing), and bland seminar language about self-improvement, including articles titled "Change Begins With Discipline" and "Step Outside Your Comfort Zone." Please, Robert, I'm only here to learn how to make an Alfredo Bacon Burger.

Carla Hall's website is endearingly eclectic, bordering on chaotic—sound familiar? Chef Hall's larger-than-life personality is as much of a draw as her recipes, so it's okay that everything's a bit jumbled here in a way that invites the reader to try to keep up. The sidebar has a link that just says "BISCUIT TIME," and if you click, it, you're taken to a page that says, "What time is it? It's Biscuit Time!" Yes, chef. It is Biscuit Time. We will follow this woman to the ends of the earth, from Reuben Bread to Recess. Hootie hoo!

When you navigate to bobbyflay.com, your cursor turns into a fork. I repeat: THE CURSOR IS A FORK. Don't you want to see your cursor become a fork? Beyond the technical wonders of a long-tined cursor, this site has an all-around midcentury modern aesthetic, with pleasing fonts, bold photography, and a neutral color palette throughout.

"The apron I tie on is inevitably battle-stained with remnants of my creations—both the good and the works in progress," reads the bombastic homepage text. "That apron (my shield from the tough moments of the world) reminds me that I'm not afraid to fail as long as I make every effort to succeed." I was just here to play around with the fork cursor, but I got a bonus motivational speech for my trouble.

Aside from an interesting timeline of Flay's cooking career, there's a "Daily Special" section with a curated selection of recipes. No expense was spared in the making of this site, and it shows. Perhaps it's funded by the proceeds from Nacho the Cat's product line.

Mynameisyeh.com is a whimsical, delightful-to-look-at blog that wants to keep you around its light, breezy environs all day long. It's got that sans serif, all-lowercase charm that's equal parts playful and professional, and a bare-bones aesthetic belies the true wealth of recipes available on this site—hundreds of them.

Unfortunately, Yeh's internet presence was so successful at vaulting her to a TV career that the website is now a demonstration of what happens to a chef's web presence once they ink a contract with the Food Network. The most recent mynameisyeh.com post is from January 2021, and things are starting to feel a bit dusty in here. At least it'll take years to work through all these recipes she left behind.

This one has the wow factor. You're greeted with a (literal) sizzle reel the moment you land on the chefaaronsanchez.com homepage, a fullscreen montage of the most algorithmically appetizing recipes coming together before your very eyes. You don't dare look away, lest you miss red wine being decanted and swirled in a glass, tortillas being pressed and fired off, avocados being mashed, peppers being blistered over an open flame. This is food porn of the highest order—and the emphasis really is on the food, not Chef Sánchez.

These recipes, by the way, could hardly be described as beginner-friendly, but that only reinforces Sánchez's brand, which has always emphasized quality. As a descriptor of his dishes, "Simple Food, Big Flavor" is a bit at odds with a 29-ingredient recipe for beans, but we won't split hairs about it because we know that when it comes to Sanchez's creations, the proof is in the pudding.

Ominously, the recipes page was most recently updated with three recipes in March 2020... before never posting any recipes again. Hmm. Maybe slap a quick blog post on there just to let us know you're okay, Aarón.

Dammit, Alton, you're always going irritatingly above and beyond when presented with a simple assignment. This is the man who can't even make scrambled eggs without exhaustive experimentation to find the perfect formula, and now I find out he's gone and created a personal website more akin to a Sherlock Holmes crime scene than a platform for shilling cookbooks. Brown's website is, indeed, trying to sell you his latest cookbook, but his culinary career was only an accidental outgrowth of his cinematic one, and the website reflects that.

Different sections of altonbrown.com are hidden as easter eggs throughout the domestic scene, and hovering over various elements of the room will cause them to animate. It's more panache than any personal website requires, but giving 600% is the trait we most associate with Alton Brown, for better or for worse.