Luckily for Jill Cordes, she’s a morning person. Before joining Food Network’s show, The Best Of, she survived two years of rising daily at 3 am to co-produce and solo-anchor an hour-and-a-half morning show.

Jill's traded in her 3 am workdays in order to travel the country for the Food Network show The Best Of. She and co-host Marc Silverstein scour the nation in search of some of the best restaurants in North America, interviewing the people who make food their personal art.

Although she had humble beginnings in the Great Plains of South Dakota, Jill gained valuable experience as a reporter at a small NBC station in Rapid City in 1995. She covered the local news, anchored the weekend news, and--in a market where you had to do it all yourself--learned how to shoot, write, edit and produce.

After ten months as a "one-man band," Jill landed a job as a reporter in Sioux Falls, S.D. There she anchored a Saturday morning show and reported during the week. In January 1997, Jill moved to Omaha, Nebr., where she was the morning anchor at the ABC affiliate-KETV--the job which required her enthusiasm at 3 am every day.

A Penn State honors graduate with a major in journalism and a minor in political science, Jill enjoys the outdoors and loves working out--whether it be boxing, yoga or running--she ran the Twin Cities marathon with her then-future husband in 1999, and is now planning on going for it again, this time in New York City, where she and her husband, Phil, now live. They, along with her two cats Katie and Draino (found in a Philadelphia sewer years ago) made the big move to Manhattan in August 2001 from Minneapolis, Minn. Her husband is studying film at Columbia University while Jill continues to embark on her many food adventures.