Bret Bannon has spent a lifetime cooking and learning from others along the way. He was very fortunate to have staged at the Park Avenue Café in New York when Daniel Budd was pastry chef and has apprenticed with the award winning Chocolatier, BT McElrath headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

While assisting cooking classes and later running a cooking school in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he has worked with many notable chefs and cookbook authors including Suvir Saran, Rocco DiSpirito, Anne Willian, Joanne Weir, Jeffrey Alford and Zoë François.

For more than 25 years now, he has been sharing his passion for the table by teaching at various top-notch cooking schools in Saint Paul and Minneapolis MN.

He has consulted for General Mills, Inc., and back in the day his cooking segments aired on a mid-morning program of KARE 11. His recipes have been featured in Midwest Home magazine and in Cooking Pleasures magazine. His recipes and food styling were  also included in various issues of Spezzatino magazine.

As a self-professed Francophile, every chance he gets he leads culinary tours to various regions of France, including Paris, Burgundy and in Provence, where his tour follows the footsteps of Julia Child not far from the Côte d’Azur.

He is privileged to work with some top-notch food photographers in the Twin Cities, including David Schmit, Ingrid Young, Carolyn Cherry, and Michael Schmidt.