Celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis will visit Wilmington in late January in support of the Girls Leadership Academy of Wilmington.
 
De Laurentiis is the granddaughter of Dino De Laurentiis, a restaurateur turned filmmaker who helped established Wilmington’s film production studios in the 1980s. Prior to that he owned DDL Foodshow, a specialty food shop and restaurant where Giada De Laurentiis spent many of her younger days cultivating a passion for Italian cuisine. A native of Rome, Giada De Laurentiis studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and worked at several Los Angeles restaurants including the Wolfgang Puck-owned Spago.
 
Her longest-running program, Everyday Italian, premiered on the Food Network in 2003. She won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lifestyle Host in 2008 and was inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame in 2012.
 
The all-girls GLOW Academy opened in August with its inaugural class of 100 sixth graders. The first single-gender charter school in North Carolina, GLOW is dedicated to closing the opportunity and achievement gap among families with fewer available resources. 
 
Three GLOW fundraising events are scheduled for Jan. 26 and 27: a dinner to be served in a private home and public breakfast and lunch events to be held at the Country Club of Landfall. 
 
Giada De Laurentiis will prepare the private dinner and supervise a staff of Wilmington chefs for the breakfast and lunch events. She will share stories from behind the scenes of her career and memories of her early years in Italy.
 
The breakfast event will be featured in a Food Network live broadcast, and the lunch event will include a silent auction.
 
In January, chef Emeril Lagasse, a friend of Judy Girard, GLOW Academy co-founder and former Food Network president, hosted similar events, which raised more than $260,000 for the school.
 
Tickets are available at www.glowacademy.net.


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