The man who wrote for The Office, ate through Hong Kong, and had to explain on the internet that he is, in fact, the good one.
Jason Kessler does not fit neatly into any one category, which is exactly how he likes it. He is an Emmy-winning TV writer, a food journalist with a weekly Bon Appétit byline, a Travel Channel host, a creative director, a documentary filmmaker, a classical guitarist, and a cancer survivor - all wrapped in one person who also happens to have history's most inconveniently shared name.
In Hollywood, he broke ground as the first person ever to hold the title of Digital Writer - back when "digital" still sounded like something people said with air quotes at industry panels. He spent four seasons in the writers' room of NBC's The Office, where he helped create what became one of the most beloved American comedies of its era. He was nominated for a Writers Guild Award. He invented "Kevin Cooks Stuff in the Office." He also wrote "The Banker," which is the one where the documentary crew pretends the show is getting cancelled - a clip episode so self-aware it practically predicts the internet.
When he left the writers' room, he traded mockumentary sitcoms for Michelin stars. His weekly food column for Bon Appétit became the kind of thing readers actually looked forward to. He added GQ, Food Republic, American Way, and Eater LA to his byline collection - and won a North American Travel Journalist Award for his trouble. He wrote Samuel L. Jackson's speech at the MTV Movie Awards. He compared every NBA team to an item on the Cheesecake Factory menu. He ate 18 Michelin-starred meals in Hong Kong in a single week, which is either a professional achievement or a personal record or both.
In 2014, he launched Fly&Dine, a travel and dining platform built on the premise that the food you eat while traveling says as much about a destination as any museum or monument. The platform's "Your Oyster" newsletter delivers reader-submitted travel tips - the kind of crowd-sourced knowledge that no guidebook covers. He took the concept a step further as host of Trip Testers on Travel Channel, where he and co-host Jeff Miller visited the world's most-hyped destinations to find out whether they actually lived up to the hype. (Spoiler: sometimes they did.)
All of this happened while he was also writing brand campaigns for major corporations as a creative director, making documentary films, and learning classical guitar. The man runs on curiosity and Flamin' Hot Cheetos, which he discovered late in life and now champions with the zeal of a convert.
"When you share a name with someone widely believed to be a monster, you too become a monster by association - whether you like it or not."
In 2017, the internet became convinced that Jason Kessler was a monster. The problem was not his writing, his career, or his work. It was simply that another man with his exact name organized a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the internet's search engines are not, historically, great at nuance.
The good Jason Kessler had his Twitter verification badge pulled. He received messages wishing him violence. He watched years of online reputation work evaporate over a long weekend. His response was swift, pointed, and very much in character: he wrote a piece for Salon titled "Not That Jason Kessler," he started the hashtag #JasonKesslersAgainstRacistJasonKesslers, and he kept working.
He later noted the additional irony that his father, David Kessler - the former FDA Commissioner who spent years fighting the tobacco industry - had experienced a nearly identical name-confusion problem when a different David Kessler was appointed to the FDA. The Kesslers are, apparently, a family with a tradition of having their names borrowed by the news cycle.
"The fact that he also pushes anti-Semitic propaganda is so ironic that Alanis Morrisette's ears must be tingling."
He compared every NBA team to an item on the Cheesecake Factory menu. This is reported as an achievement on his professional website. He is correct to list it there.
He discovered Flamin' Hot Cheetos later in life than most people do and responded with the unrestrained enthusiasm of someone who just found out fire is real. He has not been quiet about it since.
His father is David Kessler, the former FDA Commissioner who spent years trying to regulate tobacco - a man who took on the entire cigarette industry and lived to write books about it. Jason's family, evidently, does not do small stakes.
He is a classical guitarist and a documentary filmmaker. These are not his day jobs. This is just who he is when no one is asking him to write brand campaigns or review hotel amenity kits.
"Making people laugh, making people think, and making people enjoy the world around them more."
Most travel writers get on a plane and write about where they land. Kessler writes about the plane, too. Fly&Dine, the platform he founded, covers the full arc of the travel experience - from what they're serving in business class to what's worth eating at the destination itself.
The site lives on the Boarding Area network, which puts it alongside the most-read travel and frequent flyer content on the internet. Kessler writes across categories: in-air meal reviews, airport terminal guides, hotel stays, destination pieces, and product roundups for travelers who actually pay attention to what they bring on board.
His "Your Oyster" newsletter is the crowd-sourced layer: reader-submitted tips for travel experiences that don't show up in search results or sponsored content. The kind of thing a local would tell you, not a tourism board.
Recent coverage includes family stays at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach, Morimoto's restaurant aboard a cruise ship, hotel reviews from Costa Rica and Panama, and practical travel-hack guides. The content has shifted toward family travel without losing the food-forward perspective that launched the platform.