Celebrity cook Rachael Ray made a rare appearance in New York City on Wednesday morning, ahead of her turn on The Drew Barrymore Show. The 57-year-old looked laid back in a muted ensemble, which included a brown leather jacket, a brown shirt, and brown trousers. She completed the look with chunky bronze boots and a black handbag, as her brunette locks fell in subtle waves past her shoulders. Rachael kept her glam natural with a subtle pink lipstick and manicured brows.
The TV personality has kept a relatively low profile in 2025 and after enduring a tough five years, due to a health issue and several tragedies involving her properties. Rachael revealed on her podcast, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, that she’d suffered “a couple of bad falls” in 2024 while carrying firewood outside her home in New York, yet appeared to recover quickly from the ordeal.
The star, who is married to entertainment lawyer and musician John M. Cusimano, watched her home in Lake Luzerne, New York, burn down in 2020 after a fire broke out in the roof. “We lost a huge part of the physical evidence that we exist, all of the things we had created – paintings and pictures and music, plus everything we were gifted over the years or collected together as a couple; paintings that were made for us and letters that were written to us,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
Thankfully, they were able to move into the guest house next door and rebuild their family home. Only a year later, their New York City apartment flooded after Hurricane Ida swept through, leaving tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage behind. “We had finally just finished the work on making the apartment over. And then, Ida took it out. And I mean, out. Down hard,” she explained to People.
“Like, literally every speaker in the ceiling, the fireplace, every seam in the wall…It was like the apartment just literally melted, like in Wicked or something.” When a team came to help rebuild the home and make it safe to live in, another disaster occurred.
© BACKGRIDRachael made a rare public appearance on Wednesday
“[The remediation team] comes in. They put up their fans and their humidifiers. And then, they make a hole in the wall and break the main water pipe and flood the entire building down to the first floor, from our apartment on the sixth floor,” she recalled. “The people that we were waiting for, the cavalry, burst this pipe and made everything worse.”
© BACKGRIDThe star has endured several setbacks in recent years
“Tell me you would not feel like a kicked can,” she said, before adding, “There are so much worse positions we could be in. I mean, I’m alive. And I do have a roof over my head. And I do have a job.”
© NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal viaRachael rose to fame in 2001 on the Food Network
Rachael rose to fame in 2001 thanks to her Food Network show, 30 Minute Meals, before nabbing her own eponymous cooking show in 2006, which ran for 17 seasons until 2023.