Kat Robinson is Arkansas’s food historian and most enthusiastic road warrior. The Little Rock-based author, named Best Author in the 2022 Arkansas Times Readers' Choice Awards, is the host of the Emmy-nominated documentary Make Room For Pie; A Delicious Slice of The Natural State, the Emmy-nominated host of the self-produced documentary Arkansas Dairy Bars: Neat Eats and Cool Treats, and the star of the Arkansas PBS show Home Cooking with Kat and Friends. She is a founding member of the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame selection committee, a co-chair of the Arkansas Pie Festival, and the Arkansas fellow to the National Food and Beverage Museum.
She has written twelve books on food, most notably Arkansas Food: The A to Z of Eating in The Natural State, an alphabetic guide to the dishes, delights and food traditions that define her home state. Two of her more recent travel guides, 101 Things to Eat in Arkansas Before You Die and 102 More Things to Eat in Arkansas Before You Die define the state’s most iconic and trusted eateries. Robinson’s Another Slice of Arkansas Pie: A Guide to the Best Restaurants, Bakeries, Truck Stops and Food Trucks for Delectable Bites in The Natural State outlines more than 400 places to find the dessert, an extraordinary accomplishment that took thousands of miles, hundreds of hours and so many bites to properly document and catalogue.
She shares her personal life experiences in A Bite of Arkansas: A Cookbook of Natural State Delights, the 2020 memoir and cookbook which offers 140 recipes made by and photographed herself. She also recently edited and contributed to the collection 43 Tables: An Internet Community Dines During Quarantine.
Her most recent work is The Great Arkansas Pie Book, a collection of 249 different recipes for Arkansas's favorite dish. In the collection, she showcases recipes from both current and historic restaurants, cookbooks dating back more than a century, and home cooks who have shared their specialties. The collection also includes stories, fun facts, and the full-color photography the author has become well known for, illustrating her works with authentic, real life imagery that shows both the flaws and the flashy bits of the dishes she encounters.
She's also known for the nostalgic Arkansas Dairy Bars: Neat Eats and Cool Treats, the companion book for the 2021 Arkansas PBS television special of the same name. Within, Robinson explores the histories of these enduring roadside dives that offer ice cream, burgers, hot dogs and more through service windows, while sharing food recommendations and stories about the folks who still run these culinary treasures. The book is noted for its unusual photographic style; to answer concerns about the spread of COVID-19 and efforting to keep others safe, Robinson shot all of the lead images for the book on the dashboard of her vehicle. The resulting tome serves both as a travel guide for hungry visitors and a preserved history of this unique form of restaurant.
Her other 2021 work, Arkansas Cookery: Retro Recipes from The Natural State, examines mid-century cookbooks from all over Arkansas. Robinson's collection of more than 400 20th century cookbooks and research into common threads of shared recipes, cooking methods and flavors of the era has been brought together for this lovingly photographed collection of the foods previous generations brought to the table. The recipes, redacted and cooked with period methods at The Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, were all shot on location. The lushly illustrated book will be released in late October, 2021.
Kat Robinson's work has appeared in regional and national publications including Food Network, Forbes Travel Guide, Serious Eats, and AAA Magazines, among others. Her expertise in food research and Arkansas restaurants has been cited by Saveur, Eater, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Outline, Atlas Obscura and the Southern Foodways Alliance's Gravy podcast, for her skills and talents related to food research and documentation.
Her efforts have been celebrated in articles by Arkansas Good Roads, Arkansas Business and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. She has served as the keynote speaker for the South Arkansas Literary Festival and has spoken before the Arkansas Library Association and at the Six Bridges Literary Festival, Eureka Springs Books in Bloom and the Fayetteville True Lit Festival.
While she writes on food and travel subjects throughout the United States, she is best known for her ever-expanding knowledge of Arkansas food history and restaurant culture, all of which she explores on her 1200+ article website, TieDyeTravels.com.
Robinson’s journeys across Arkansas have earned her the title "road warrior," "traveling pie lady," and probably some minor epithets. Few have spent as much time exploring The Natural State, or researching its cuisine. "The Girl in the Hat" has been sighted in every one of Arkansas's 75 counties, oftentimes sliding behind a menu or peeking into a kitchen.
Kat lives with daughter Hunter and partner Grav Weldon in Little Rock.
You can contact the author at kat@tiedyetravels.com with questions or correspondence - or, of course, recommendations on great recipes and wonderful places to eat in Arkansas.
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