Who Is Norah O'Donnell's Husband, Chef Geoff Tracy?

"CBS Evening News" anchor Norah O'Donnell has been a fixture of the small screen for decades, a familiar face who will tell you about the highs and lows of the day's events. While O'Donnell's role at CBS News has been through some shake-ups, she's without a doubt become a staple of a network. Meanwhile, the news anchor's husband, Chef Geoff Tracy, happens to be a staple of the Washington, D.C., restaurant scene. Tracy has run numerous restaurants in the nation's capitol ever since he opened his first location in 2000. "It seems like yesterday and also 100 years ago. It's definitely an accomplishment when you live through more than one lease term," he reflected in an interview with Eater DC.

"Opening the doors to my first restaurant has brought me a great deal of happiness and joy," Tracy told the audience when he gave a TEDx Talk in 2012. "I love my career so much that I don't even consider it work." He went on to encourage listeners to find something they love and find a way to monetize it.

Geoff Tracy is a restaurateur and a family man, a lover of his kids and his dogs, and an advocate for the free-speech rights of restaurant owners everywhere ... or at least, in Virginia. He's teamed up with some important political figures and his famous wife for various causes. In other words, he does a bit of everything, and O'Donnell is right by his side as he does it all.

Geoff Tracy and Norah O'Donnell have been together for a long time, ever since they were freshmen together at Georgetown University. In fact, they got together very early in their freshman year, and fittingly, their meet-cute had a lot to do with food. "Geoff and I met in 1991 in the cafeteria line at New South cafeteria. It was the first week of school," O'Donnell later told Georgetown.edu. Tracy agreed with her recollection, adding that he was intrigued by O'Donnell's Texas upbringing and decided to make the first move. "So we found the courage and went over and said hi," he said. "In retrospect, it's a little unbelievable that I met the person I've been married to my entire life."

Shortly after that day in the cafeteria, they had their official first date ... and their first engagement. "There was a creepy old guy who was hitting on me," O'Donnell recalled, setting the scene at the bar where they went to get to know one another. "We cooked up a scenario where Geoff would propose to me to get the creepy old guy away from me."

Eventually, news of the engagement swept through the bar, and they were even congratulated over the loudspeaker. "It was kind of a sweet, fun way to meet someone and start a relationship," Tracy recalled. "The rest was history." Indeed, they've been together ever since.

In 2009, Norah O'Donnell appeared on "The Late Show With Craig Ferguson" (via People) and told the audience a funny anecdote about what her home life is like. "My husband was giving a speech to some students at Georgetown," she explained, "and he said to these students, 'I have three kids under 2, and yes, all with the same woman.'" Geoff Tracy and O'Donnell do indeed have three children: Fraternal twins Grace and Henry came first, followed little more than a year later by a girl named Riley. "Grandparents are great!" O'Donnell said, when asked whether the couple has had any help with raising their young family.

More than a decade later, as the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, O'Donnell spoke with People about how she was balancing her high-pressure career with her high-pressure home life. "Right now, I'm a work-at-home mom and the managing editor of the 'CBS Evening News' ... Lots of times, I'm on a conference call and cooking breakfast for the kids at the same time," she said.

These days, the kids' proud father can be found showing off their accomplishments on Instagram. His son appears to be quite a talented golfer, for example, and Tracy often shouts out his son's games online. "Solid team 2nd place. And these three did some impressive individual work," he wrote in 2024, alongside a photo of his son and some teammates holding medals.

When Geoff Tracy and Norah O'Donnell had three very young kids, they hit on a quick and easy way to feed them: they made their own baby food. In an interview with The Washington Post, O'Donnell explained that they were trying to set their kids up for success by giving them a taste for nutritious meals. "Kids develop a palate really, really young. You can introduce a number of foods [early], especially the fruits and veggies, which develops a foundation for healthy eating for life," she said. To that end, the couple spent an hour each weekend making food for the week, turning fruits like apples and pears into frozen purees. "The idea is that if you can make a margarita," Tracy reasoned, "you can make baby food."

To that end, Tracy and O'Donnell turned their method into a combination cookbook and memoir, publishing "Baby Love" together in 2010. In an interview with Sweet Potato Chronicles, Tracy said that the book's recipes were meant to get parents and kids cooking together. In particular, he said, he loved making pancakes with his kids, noting that his recipe was in the cookbook. "I made them with Riley just this morning," he said. "It can be messy, but it is worth it." Furthermore, Tracy said he'd always treasure the process of making the book, adding, "It will always serve as reminder/memoir of this challenging but amazing period of time."

While Norah O'Donnell is known around Washington, D.C., for her on-camera work as a news anchor, Chef Geoff Tracy is famous in his own right. Tracy owns and operates multiple restaurants in the DMV, two of which bear his name: Chef Geoff's, and Chef Geoff's West End.

Speaking with Politico in 2018, Tracy recalled falling in love with the industry during his first restaurant job, as a teenager. "As a busboy I learned that if bread was hot, butter was sweet and soft, and water was iced cold ... people were happy. That made me happy," he said. Tracy was hooked, and he knew that this is what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. "I loved the action of a restaurant setting. I knew I never wanted a desk job," he said. Striking out on his own, Tracy opened his first restaurant before hitting his 30s. "I started Chef Geoff's at age 27," he said. "I wanted to start Chef Geoff's because creating something from nothing is the most American thing ever."

Nowadays, Tracy tells his customers that he's still guided by the same principle: making people happy. "When I created Chef Geoff's nearly 20 years ago, I had a simple goal ... create restaurants that make you feel part of a neighborhood community," his restaurant group's website says. "A lot has changed over the years but that simple goal remains our North Star."

As part of former first lady Michelle Obama's children's health initiative, she spoke to the National Restaurant Association in 2010, imploring them to consider childhood obesity as they crafted their menus. "We have to do more, we have to go farther, and we need your help to lead this effort," she told them (via the Associated Press). Geoff Tracy backed up her message, insisting that he'd rewritten his own restaurants' menus after he had kids. As a result, his restaurants included options like child-sized portions and healthy fruit as side dishes. "I don't think we give kids enough credit," he said.

Obama tapped Tracy to help with her "Let's Move" initiative, bringing him on board as a participant in 2014 when she brought elementary schoolers to the White House for the first harvest of the White House Kitchen Garden. Tracy appeared alongside an 11-year-old kid named Esther Matheny; together they won Obama's Kids' State Dinner competition thanks to the fish tacos and lemon-basil sorbet they prepared.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Tracy shrugged off criticism of the first lady's healthy eating campaign and her speech to the National Restaurant Association. "Of course some people there were cynical," he said. "Others like me are already seeing a market for healthier food, and someone like Michelle Obama can spread the word."

Both Geoff Tracy and Norah O'Donnell have busy, successful careers, but they still make time for one another at home. There are perks to being married to a chef, after all, and when O'Donnell has a date night at home with her husband, he's the one who cooks. "Norah will claim to have probably made two or three meals, over the course of the last year," he told Famous DC. "It's just never been her expertise. She can put together pretty nice pasta, but I'm sort of exclusively the cook at home."

Befitting of a veteran chef, Tracy and O'Donnell apparently have a pretty nice kitchen setup at home. Still, he's only human. "I have some very old coconut milk that's been in there forever," he joked. "I've got some zucchini paste that's been in there forever. Those things have gathered a lot of dust in my pantry."

Still, the chef loves to improvise when he's cooking for his family. Even though he and his wife have co-authored a cookbook together, he likes to make things up as he goes along at home, away from the pressures of a restaurant. "I have absolutely no go-to recipes," he insisted. "If I'm cooking at home, it's like open the refrigerator, see what's there, and just make something out of it."

Speaking with Georgetown.edu in 2023, updating his alma mater on his life with Norah O'Donnell, Geoff Tracy told the website, "We've got three kids now and two dogs." Boy, do they! In addition to showing off his kids on social media, Tracy is also a proud dog dad, maintaining a separate Instagram for Killer and Fang, the family pups. Despite their ferocious names, the dogs appear to be small, soft, and cuddly. "Guard Dogs. Hybrid Mix, But Mostly Doberman," their bio reads, which is most definitely a joke.

In fact, Tracy seems to use the account as a way to show off his sense of humor. Alongside one video of both dogs napping at the top of a staircase, Tracy wrote, "Guarding the stairs." In 2022, he shared a snap of one dog sitting in the passenger seat of what appears to be quite a nice convertible. "I've grown accustomed to nice things. Fang can sit in the back with the children. -Killer," Tracy captioned the video. O'Donnell and Tracy famously made their own baby food for their kids; there's no word whether the chef whips up gourmet house kibble, too.

As a fixture of CBS News, Norah O'Donnell has covered politics for decades, even tussling with former president Donald Trump. Geoff Tracy, on the other hand, tends to stay out of things. In 2018, however, he got involved when he sued the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control in order to get them to change their happy hour advertising laws. The state's laws were quite restrictive, and restaurants like Chef Geoff's were prevented from advertising certain drink specials. "We're talking about something that Virginia has agreed is a perfectly fine thing to have, which is a happy hour. But they're restricting our ability to give pertinent, truthful information," he told WAMU.

Speaking with WMAL, Tracy clarified that this was a First Amendment issue. "I should be able to tell you that the beer is $5 or it is $2 off," he explained. "I think every reasonable person would agree that is kind of ridiculous. It's just kind of a weird limitation on free speech or creative advertising speech that doesn't make any sense."

In 2019, more than a year after he filed the lawsuit, Virginia's happy hour laws were overturned. Tracy spoke with The Washington Post about the victory, reflecting, "Virginia has always been a really good state to do business in. Now, it became a little bit better."

In September 2023, Geoff Tracy posted a selfie on Instagram he took with a member of his staff. "Happy 41st Birthday to Chef Guillermo!" he wrote. "Started working for CG at 19." Another photo showed him with a different chef. "HBD to Chef Olga. We've been working together for 23 years!!" he said. These photos would certainly suggest that Tracy's employees are happy to keep working for him for a long time, suggesting a great working environment in the back of house at his restaurants.

That being said, according to an interview in The Washingtonian, Tracy has become well-known for just how carefully he manages the goings-on at his locations. (For the record, rumor has it Norah O'Donnell is a tough boss herself.) "Consistency is a lot harder than it looks. It might just be the hardest thing of all to achieve," Tracy told the outlet. To that end, Tracy's restaurants assess their staff on a staggering 800 performance standards, an assessment conducted bimonthly. They are rated on everything from plating consistency to whether staff re-fold customers' napkins whenever they get up from the table. Everything is then tracked in computers, and Tracy combs through his data looking for patterns. Staff are also trained in 70 separate training modules for his restaurants.

Still, it seems that many members of his staff — or at least, his management team — don't mind. "Does it sound like we're all drinking the Kool-Aid? Well, we are," one manager told The Washingtonian. "There's a lot to drink."