Matt Straus is among the people in the world for whom life is at its best around a dining table. He worked in fast food, and then restaurant kitchens and dining rooms as a teenager, before attending Skidmore College, where he focused on the arts (and heavily on theater), politics, history, and Victorian English essays. He moved to Los Angeles in 2000 at age twenty-seven, and after service positions at Campanile and L'Orangerie, became the wine director at Grace Restaurant in 2003.

He earned a culinary degree at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts in Vancouver, B.C. in 2005. In 2008 he moved to San Francisco in search of a quaint space for a new restaurant, and opened Heirloom Café on Folsom Street in 2010. He has twice been named one of Food & Wine's Best Sommeliers. His food at Heirloom Café, and now at Heirloom Lodge, which he describes as a culinary intersection of a rustic, ingredient, fruit-and-vegetable-driven approach to cooking, and classical European cuisine, has been lauded for its flavor, beauty and simplicity. He is the founding editor of Kitchen Work Magazine, and the director of the Kitchen Work Foundation.