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Food|At a Memorial for Anne Burrell, a Karaoke Tribute to Her Bold Style
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/dining/anne-burrell-memorial-service.html
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The Food Network chef, who died Tuesday at 55, was remembered in a star-studded service that sent her off with a singalong.
June 20, 2025, 7:34 p.m. ET
As friends, relatives and colleagues filed into a memorial service for the Food Network host Anne Burrell in Manhattan on Friday afternoon, they noticed that somebody had placed on each chair a sheet of Billy Joel’s lyrics to “Only the Good Die Young.”
At the end of the event, they learned why. Ms. Burrell’s husband, Stuart Claxton, urged them to “give her a big send-off” in a karaoke-style singalong joined by Food Network executives and hosts including Scott Conant, Amanda Freitag, Marc Forgione and Geoffrey Zakarian.
“We’ve got one shot at this, so let’s make it count,” Mr. Claxton said as the opening lines flashed on two large screens on either side of the closed coffin in the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side.
The city’s medical examiner has not yet determined a cause of death for Ms. Burrell, who was found unresponsive in the shower at her Brooklyn home on Tuesday morning. According to an internal document viewed by The New York Times, Ms. Burrell, who was 55, was “surrounded by approximately (100) assorted pills.” Emergency medical workers who responded to a 911 call pronounced her dead at the scene.
But any clouds of mystery were determinedly kept at bay during the service, which was a celebration of a woman who, by all accounts, rarely passed up an occasion to celebrate. She had spent the night before she died performing at an improv club in Brooklyn.
Her manager, Scott Feldman, recalled that Ms. Burrell invariably introduced him as “my dad” when he went out with her in the evenings.
