Andrew Zimmern Wife Rishia Haas: The Woman Who Held It Together While Andrew Zimmern Ate the World

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	Rishia Haas
Date of Birth	July 29, 1973
Place of Birth/Raised	Anoka, Minnesota, USA
Nationality	American
Occupation	Administrative Professional, Recovery Support Specialist, Beekeeper
Known For	Ex-wife of celebrity chef and TV host Andrew Zimmern
Parents	Robert and Karen Haas
Siblings	Jennifer and John
Education	Anoka High School; Augsburg College, Minneapolis
Marriage	Andrew Zimmern (December 26, 2002 – divorced 2018)
Son	Noah Zimmern (born 2005)
Career Highlights	The Retreat (Admissions Coordinator); Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation (Administrative Assistant); University of Minnesota Bee Lab
Estimated Net Worth	~$3–5 million

Introduction

If you search for “Andrew Zimmern wife,” you will find Rishia Haas — a woman from Anoka, Minnesota, who spent sixteen years being married to one of television’s most recognizable food personalities and somehow managed to stay almost entirely out of the frame the entire time.

That is not an accident. It is a choice. And understanding that choice — why someone would stand next to an international television career and consistently step backward rather than forward — tells you more about Rishia Haas than any amount of red carpet photographs ever could.

She grew up in a small city in Minnesota. She attended a state college in Minneapolis. She built a career in healthcare administration and addiction recovery support — work that requires the ability to sit with people in crisis and help them find their way through it. She married Andrew Zimmern when Bizarre Foods was beginning to take off. She raised their son Noah largely on her own while Andrew traveled the world eating goat testicles on television. She divorced him after sixteen years, co-parented with genuine grace, and went on with her life in Minnesota.

Andrew called her publicly “the bravest and kindest mom I know.” That might be the most revealing thing anyone has said about Rishia Haas — that the most famous person she ever knew looked at her and reached for bravery and kindness as the words that fit.

Growing Up in Anoka, Minnesota

Anoka is a small city north of Minneapolis along the Rum River — a place with a strong local identity and the particular self-sufficiency of communities that exist close enough to a major metropolitan area to have access to its resources but far enough to maintain their own distinct character. It calls itself the Halloween Capital of the World, which tells you something about its affection for its own small distinctions.

Rishia was born there on July 29, 1973, the daughter of Robert and Karen Haas. She grew up alongside her two siblings, Jennifer and John, in what multiple sources describe as a stable, loving household — a Christian family where values around service and community were part of the texture of daily life rather than abstractions. Her parents appear to have instilled in her a preference for substance over spectacle, for doing rather than performing, that would later characterize every professional and personal choice she made.

She attended Anoka High School. It was the high school of her neighborhood, her community, her world — not a preparatory school chosen for its connections to a particular professional future. She was, by every available account, a normal Minnesotan kid in a normal Minnesotan town, building the interior life that would eventually allow her to stay calm and purposeful when the external circumstances of her life became anything but.

She developed an early interest in sports alongside her academic work. She was not pointed toward a single-minded career ambition. She was developing herself, broadly, in the way that happens in households where character is valued more than credential.

Augsburg College and the Transition to Minneapolis

After high school, Rishia made the move that many Anoka graduates make — south to Minneapolis for university. She enrolled at Augsburg College, the private liberal arts institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, that sits in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. Augsburg has a strong tradition of service-oriented education and community engagement that aligns naturally with the values Rishia had grown up with.

Her specific course of study at Augsburg has not been publicly documented, but the career direction she took after graduation — administrative work in healthcare, then a move into addiction recovery support — suggests coursework in health-related fields or social services. The through-line between her education and her professional life is consistent enough to suggest intentional formation rather than accidental career drift.

Minneapolis also gave her proximity to a culinary and food education scene that, in 1999, would produce the most consequential meeting of her life.

Meeting Andrew Zimmern: The Cooking School, 1999

Andrew Zimmern’s early biography is significantly more dramatic than Rishia’s. He grew up in New York City, attended the Dalton School and Vassar College, worked in prestigious New York restaurant kitchens, and then spent years of his adult life in the grip of serious addiction — homeless, stealing, surviving. He eventually got sober and made his way to Minneapolis, where he rebuilt his life and established himself in the local food and restaurant scene.

By 1999, he was working as a teacher at a cooking school in Minneapolis. Rishia was working there too. Their paths crossed inside the particular environment of a kitchen classroom — a place built around the sharing of practical knowledge, the hands-on navigation of technique, and the kind of sustained proximity that lets people show who they actually are rather than who they’re trying to appear to be.

They connected. They dated. They took their time. Neither of them was in a hurry to rush toward something that would need to last.

On December 26, 2002 — the day after Christmas — they married in a small, private ceremony surrounded by the people who mattered most to them. There was no announcement crafted for maximum press impact. There was no magazine deal. It was two people making a commitment in the manner of people who understand that the commitment itself is the point.

The Marriage Years: Staying Home While the World Called

When Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern premiered on the Travel Channel in 2007, the show that had been building in development finally reached its audience. It was a hit. Andrew Zimmern was suddenly one of the most recognizable food personalities on American television — the man willing to eat anything, anywhere, who brought genuine curiosity and zero pretension to the exploration of global food cultures.

The success was real and rapid. More shows followed. Bizarre World. The Zimmern List. What’s Eating America. Appearances, events, endorsements, restaurant consulting. The life of an international television personality is not organized around family dinners at six. It is organized around flights and shoots and schedules that treat home as the recovery space between the real action.

Rishia managed all of it. Their son Noah was born in 2005, two years before the show’s premiere — which means that during the years when Andrew’s career was generating its most intense external demands, Rishia was also in the early and most intensive years of parenting a small child. She did not hire an army of help and attend a parallel social circuit. She focused on Noah, on stability, on creating the home that would anchor their family while Andrew’s professional world pulled in every other direction.

She was not invisible during this period. She attended events. She appeared at Andrew’s side when presence was genuinely supportive rather than performative. But she consistently stepped back from the kind of visibility that the wife of a television star can generate if she chooses to pursue it. She did not choose to pursue it.

Andrew’s sobriety — which he has spoken about publicly in detail, the story of homelessness and addiction and recovery that preceded his Minneapolis chapter — was one of the foundations of the life they had built together. She had known him as a sober man. She had married him with full knowledge of what that history contained. Whatever support she provided to his continued recovery over the years of their marriage was, by every account, genuine and sustained.

Career: The Retreat and Hazelden Betty Ford

While raising Noah and supporting Andrew’s career, Rishia built her own professional identity in the field of addiction recovery services — a choice that reflects both her values and, possibly, the particular insights that come from being close to someone with a serious recovery history.

She worked as an Admissions Coordinator at The Retreat — formally called “The Retreat Alive with the Spirit of Recovery” — a residential rehabilitation facility in Wayzata, Minnesota, that offers an alternative alcohol recovery program rooted in the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. The admissions coordinator role is the first human contact many people in crisis have with a treatment facility. It requires the ability to respond to people at their most vulnerable, to communicate clearly under emotional pressure, and to navigate the practical and insurance complexities of accessing residential care while maintaining genuine compassion throughout.

She later transitioned to a role as an Administrative Assistant at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation — one of the most respected addiction treatment organizations in the United States. Hazelden Betty Ford was formed in 2014 through the merger of the Hazelden Foundation and the Betty Ford Center, creating an organization with both historic significance and national reach. Their Center City, Minnesota, campus is one of the flagship residential treatment facilities in the country.

Working at Hazelden Betty Ford — even in an administrative capacity — places a person at the heart of a mission that is literally about saving lives. The organization treats thousands of patients annually, provides training to addiction counselors across the country, and conducts research that shapes national treatment protocols. Rishia’s contribution was administrative rather than clinical, but the environment demands a particular kind of human seriousness from everyone who works there.

Her connection to the University of Minnesota Bee Lab — where she became involved in beekeeping — added another dimension to her life outside the professional structures she had built. Beekeeping is a practice that requires patience, attentiveness, and a willingness to work within natural systems rather than imposing on them. It is, in a sense, a perfect fit for someone whose professional and personal life has consistently been organized around care rather than control.

The Divorce: 2018 and the Grace of a Clean Ending

In 2018, after nearly sixteen years of marriage, Rishia and Andrew Zimmern divorced. The decision was, by all available accounts, mutual and handled with the kind of adult dignity that makes it possible for two people to continue being decent to each other after the romantic partnership has ended.

Neither party has spoken at length about the specific reasons for the divorce. Andrew has described the pressures of his career, the demands of sustained public life, and the toll that years of constant travel and professional obligation took on the family. Rishia has said nothing publicly — again consistent with her entire approach to the relationship and to public life more broadly.

What has been documented is the quality of what followed. Andrew described Rishia publicly as “the bravest and kindest mom I know” — a statement made after the marriage ended, which removes the incentive that keeps many public tributes to spouses from being entirely honest. He said it because he believed it. It also tells you something about the co-parenting relationship they maintained for Noah’s sake: civil, respectful, focused on the child rather than on the grievance.

Noah, who was approximately thirteen when the divorce was finalized, has been raised with both parents actively present in his life. He has grown up in Minnesota, shaped by his mother’s values around service and privacy and his father’s passion for curiosity and adventure. He appears to be navigating young adulthood without the particular complications that public family dissolution often creates.

Challenges: The Quiet Ones

The challenges of Rishia Haas’s marriage were not the dramatic, photogenic kind that generate celebrity news cycles. They were the slower, quieter challenges of being present for a relationship whose demands were often asymmetrical — where one partner’s career was pulling constantly outward while the other’s was anchored locally by choice and by necessity.

Managing a household and a child while a spouse is absent for extended periods of filming is not a crisis. It is a sustained low-grade demand that accumulates over years into something that is genuinely hard to sustain. It is also invisible in the way that most caregiving labor is invisible — nobody writes profiles about it, nobody gives awards for it, it simply has to be done and someone has to do it.

She also worked in one of the most emotionally demanding professional environments available — addiction treatment. People who work in that field regularly absorb the suffering of people at their lowest points, help them move toward recovery, and then watch some of them relapse and have to find the equanimity to help them try again. The emotional toll of that work is real and sustained.

Net Worth: What She Built on Her Own Terms

Rishia Haas’s net worth is estimated at approximately $3 to $5 million — figures that appear across multiple credible sources and reflect her sustained professional career in healthcare administration, the financial terms of her divorce settlement from Andrew Zimmern (whose own net worth is estimated at approximately $14 million), and whatever personal assets she has accumulated across her adult life in Minnesota.

The sources vary on the specific number, which is typical for someone whose financial life has never been publicly disclosed. What is clear is that she is financially comfortable — not through celebrity adjacency or through the kind of passive wealth that a famous spouse can generate for a partner who leans into visibility, but through her own sustained work in a serious professional field and the terms of an equitable divorce from a man of significant means.

She has never needed to leverage her former marriage for income. She has her own career, her own professional identity, and her own financial foundation. Those things represent a form of independence that she appears to have valued consistently across her adult life.

Life Today: Bees, Minneapolis, and the Quiet She Earned

Rishia Haas lives in Minnesota. She still maintains her relationship with the University of Minnesota Bee Lab and the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. She is raising — or, now that Noah is a young adult, has raised — her son in the environment she has always chosen: private, purposeful, grounded in the community she has never left.

She has no verified social media presence. She doesn’t show up on red carpets. She does not give interviews. The boundary between the public chapter of her life — the years when being Andrew Zimmern’s wife made her searchable — and her private current one appears to be as clear and as maintained as it always was.

Andrew Zimmern went on to further career expansion, including his What’s Eating America series and various entrepreneurial ventures. Their son Noah has grown up. The formal structures of their shared life have long since resolved themselves. What remains is whatever genuine good feeling exists between two people who went through something real together and found a way to end it with decency.

Final Words

Rishia Haas’s biography is, in one sense, the biography of a person who refused to have a public biography. She grew up in Anoka. She went to college in Minneapolis. She worked in addiction treatment. She married a man who became very famous, raised their son with patience and consistency, and then divorced that man with the same grace she had brought to everything else. She kept bees. She kept her privacy.

The celebrity connection is not what makes her tale worth sharing. It is the coherence of the choices she made, beginning to end. The Anoka upbringing and the service profession and the private marriage and the quiet divorce all come from the same place — a person who decided early that meaning was more important than visibility, and who never changed her mind.

Andrew Zimmern ate extraordinary things in extraordinary places for two decades of television. Rishia Haas stayed in Minnesota and helped people get sober. Both of those things are interesting. Only one of them needed a camera.

FAQs

1. Who is Rishia Haas?

Born in Anoka, Minnesota, on July 29, 1973, Rishia Haas is an American administrative professional and specialist in addiction recovery. Although she has a job in healthcare administration and recovery support, her most well-known public role is as the ex-wife of famous chef and TV broadcaster Andrew Zimmern. substantial and independent of that connection.

2. Rishia Haas was born where and when?

She was born on July 29, 1973, in Anoka, Minnesota — a small city north of Minneapolis that she has described through the shape of her adult choices as a foundational influence on her values and identity.

3. Who are Rishia Haas’s parents and siblings?

Her parents are Robert and Karen Haas. John and Jennifer are her two siblings. Multiple sources describe her family as a stable, Christian household with a strong emphasis on service and community values.

4. Where did Rishia Haas go to school?

She attended Anoka High School and later Augsburg College in Minneapolis — a private liberal arts institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, known for its emphasis on service-oriented education.

5. How did Rishia Haas meet Andrew Zimmern?

They first connected in 1999 while Andrew was a teacher at a Minneapolis cooking school. Both were working there, their paths crossed, and a relationship developed that eventually led to their 2002 marriage.

6. When did Rishia Haas and Andrew Zimmern get married?

They married on December 26, 2002 — the day after Christmas — in a small, private ceremony attended by close family and friends.

7. Do Rishia Haas and Andrew Zimmern have children?

Yes. Noah Zimmern, their only child, was born in 2005. Both parents have remained committed to co-parenting since their 2018 divorce, and Andrew has publicly praised Rishia as a mother.

8. What is Rishia Haas’s professional career?

Her career has been in healthcare administration and addiction recovery services. She worked as an Admissions Coordinator at The Retreat — a residential alcohol recovery program in Wayzata, Minnesota — and subsequently as an Administrative Assistant at the Hazelden Betty One of the most reputable addiction treatment facilities in the US is the Ford Foundation. She has also been involved with the University of Minnesota Bee Lab.

9. When did Rishia Haas and Andrew Zimmern divorce?

Their divorce was finalized in 2018, after approximately sixteen years of marriage. The separation was handled without public drama, and both parties have spoken respectfully about each other since. Andrew publicly described Rishia as “the bravest and kindest mom I know.”

10. What is Rishia Haas’s estimated net worth?

Her net worth is estimated at approximately $3 to $5 million, reflecting her professional career earnings, divorce settlement from Andrew Zimmern (whose net worth is estimated at approximately $14 million), and personal assets accumulated across her adult life. Her financial information has never been made public.

11. Is Rishia Haas on social media?

No verified public social media accounts exist under her name. She has consistently maintained a digital privacy consistent with her overall preference for a life outside public attention, and she does not appear to have changed that approach following her divorce.

12. What is Rishia Haas doing now?

She still resides in Minnesota and stays active in the University of Minnesota Bee Lab and the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. She co-parents Noah with Andrew Zimmern and lives the private, purposeful life she has always chosen — grounded in Minnesota, in service, and in the community she has never left.