Andrea Baumgardner is the Baum in BernBaum's, a bagel shop and restaurant in downtown Fargo. Baumgardner's interest in food had roots in her high school job at Leeby's, an old-school bakery and delicatessen that featured gruff, knowledgeable butchers and serious farm-style bakers who turned out perfect cake donuts, pies, and lefse. While attending Macalester College, she spent a year in Spain and France, greatly expanding her palate and her pants size. A graduate of San Francisco's California Culinary Academy, Baumgardner externed at Chez Panisse before cooking on the line at Vivande and Eos in the Bay Area and at Boxer and Cobras & Matadors in Los Angeles. In 2003, she returned to Fargo as the opening executive chef of the Hotel Donaldson. She was a partner and chef of Green Market Kitchen before creating BernBaum's with her husband, Brett Bernath, in 2016. A 2015-16 Humphrey Fellow in Public Policy at the University of Minnesota, Baumgardner is committed to teaching children to cook as a form of justice. She is a 2020 semifinalist for Best Chef: Midwest from the James Beard Foundation, a believer in pickles, and counts her retired physician father as one of her prep cooks.
