An updated and revised edition of Anthony Bourdain's mega-bestselling Kitchen Confidential, with new material from the original edition
Almost two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, Don't Eat before You Read This, by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one's appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now classic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation, a megabestseller with over one million copies in print. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business.
Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine--this time with never-before-published material.
...raw, humble, and darkly funny.-Chef Jacques Pepin
Honest. Eye-opening. Harrowing. Brilliant. -Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general of the United States
...a framework for living that applies equally to the pro kitchen, the boardroom, and the family table. -Gail Simmons, food expert, TV host and author of Bringing It Home
Culinary Leverage: A Journey Through the Heat is about exposing the dysfunction of an industry through the eyes of a highly decorated chef who, through hard-won experience, resilience and grief, soul searching and moments of reckoning, finds a healthier way forward, not just for himself but for the restaurant business as a whole. Travel with Chef Keane as his passion for hard work and cooking is ignited as a young kid growing up in Dearborn, Michigan. Cheer for him as he follows his dream to the gritty but seductive streets and kitchens of New York City and realizes his vocation. Empathize with him as he encounters and confronts bullies and egos hell-bent on destroying the dream. And root for him as he charges forth with a revolutionary new approach and strives to create an unparalleled magical journey at Cyrus for his guests and team, one based on style and substance with a conscience and connection.
From the author of Red Sands, a New Yorker Best Cookbook of the Year, a cozy, thoughtful memoir recalling food and travel in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from a basement Edinburgh kitchen, featuring a delicious recipe at the end of each chapter.
With its union of practicality and magic, Caroline Eden understands a kitchen as a portal, offering opportunities to cook, imagine and create ways back into other times, other lives and other territories. A welcoming refuge with its tempting pantry, shelves of books, and inquisitive dog, Caroline Eden's basement Edinburgh kitchen offers her comfort away from the road. Join her as she cooks recipes from her travels, reflects on past adventures, and contemplates the kitchen's unique ability to tell human stories. This is a hauntingly honest, and at times heartbreaking, memoir with the smell, taste, and preparation of food at its heart. From late night baking as a route back to Ukraine to capturing the beauty of Uzbek porcelain, and from the troublesome nature of food and art in Poland to the magic of cloudberries, Cold Kitchen celebrates the importance of curiosity and of feeling at home in the world.THE INSTANT #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
From award-winning writer Nigel Slater, comes a new and exquisitely written collection of notes, memoir, stories and small moments of joy.
'Nigel Slater's prose is the rarest delicacy of all: exquisite yet effortless, filled with heart, tenderness, yearning and humour' ELIZABETH DAY
For years, Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman's hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei.
These are the small moments, events and happenings that gave pleasure before they disappeared. Miso soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese and homes in on the scent of freshly picked sweet peas and the sound of water breathing at night in Japan.
This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end.
'I loved this. It is a secular book of hours - thoughts and pleasures beautifully cadenced and generously placed' Edmund de Waal
'Nigel Slater has a magical capacity to find beauty in the smallest moments. A nourishing, sustaining book' Olivia Laing
'His evocative, uplifting observations are a balm for life: a prose-poem for eaters and a spiritual companion for thoughtful cooks. A true and enduring joy' Nigella Lawson
'You can't always feel buoyant and grateful but noticing - and getting pleasure from - the seemingly insignificant is a good way to live. As he says, feel the small moments of joy' Diana Henry
...raw, humble, and darkly funny.-Chef Jacques Pepin
Honest. Eye-opening. Harrowing. Brilliant. -Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general of the United States
...a framework for living that applies equally to the pro kitchen, the boardroom, and the family table. -Gail Simmons, food expert, TV host and author of Bringing It Home
Culinary Leverage: A Journey Through the Heat is about exposing the dysfunction of an industry through the eyes of a highly decorated chef who, through hard-won experience, resilience and grief, soul searching and moments of reckoning, finds a healthier way forward, not just for himself but for the restaurant business as a whole. Travel with Chef Keane as his passion for hard work and cooking is ignited as a young kid growing up in Dearborn, Michigan. Cheer for him as he follows his dream to the gritty but seductive streets and kitchens of New York City and realizes his vocation. Empathize with him as he encounters and confronts bullies and egos hell-bent on destroying the dream. And root for him as he charges forth with a revolutionary new approach and strives to create an unparalleled magical journey at Cyrus for his guests and team, one based on style and substance with a conscience and connection.
Charles Baker traveled the world in search of exotic food and drink in addition to interesting people with whom he could share them. Both drink travelogue and cookbook, The Gentleman's Companion is the summation of Baker's culinary and drinking experiences abroad. Baker accents his tales of high adventure with recipes for foods and cocktails that were considered unusual specimens in the 1920s and 30s.
Baker, a captivating storyteller, wrote about food and drink for a number of well-known magazines. In this travelogue he relates how notorious figures, including Hemmingway and Faulkner, numbered among his drinking companions.
At once a culinary guidebook and haughty memoir, The Gentleman's Companion, initially published in 1939, provides a one-of-a-kind glimpse into the bombastic and glamorous world of travel in the mid-twentieth century. This edition combines both volumes of the original work: The Exotic Cookery Book and The Exotic Drinking Book.
In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother's copies of Fu Pei-mei's Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu's story and in her food, a vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world.
In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King weaves together stories from her own family and contemporary oral history to present a remarkable argument for how understanding the story of Fu's life enables us to see Chinese food as both an inheritance of tradition and a truly modern creation, influenced by the historical phenomena of the postwar era. These include a dramatic increase in the number of women working outside the home, a new proliferation of mass media, the arrival of innovative kitchen tools, and the shifting diplomatic fortunes of China and Taiwan. King reveals how and why, for audiences in Taiwan and around the world, Fu became the ultimate culinary touchstone: the figure against whom all other cooking authorities were measured.
And Fu's legacy continues. Her cookbooks have become beloved emblems of cultural memory, passed from parent to child, wherever diasporic Chinese have landed. Informed by the voices of fans across generations, King illuminates the story of Chinese food from the inside: at home, around the family dinner table. The result is a revelatory work, a rich banquet of past and present tastes that will resonate deeply for all of us looking for our histories in the kitchen.
Garner gathers a literary chorus to capture the joys of reading and eating in this comic, personal classic.
Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, simply gone together. The book you're holding is a product of these combined gluttonies.Chef and restaurateur Ben Shewry knows obsession well. Whether it's crispy-edged lasagne, saltwater crocodile ribs or the perfect potato, obsession is what motivates him and what makes him tick.
It's also what has propelled his restaurant Attica into the league of the most innovative, acclaimed dining experiences in the world, and arguably the most vital in Australian history. In this absorbing and wide-ranging memoir meets manifesto, Shewry applies his sometimes searing, sometimes comic eye to creative freedom in the kitchen, food journalism, sexism in hospitality, the fraud of the farm-to-table sustainability ethos, the cult of the chef and the legendary Family Bolognese. Raised on a farm in a close-knit rural New Zealand family, he shares how a childhood surrounded by nature and a reverence for First People's cultures has influenced his work, the values he lives by, and the meticulous, inventive multi-course menu that is synonymous with Attica. Uses for Obsession also tells the intimate, desperate story of how his Melbourne restaurant survived 262 days with an empty dining room. How, during a time of epic hospitality transformation, it morphed into a takeaway food business, a merch shop and a summer camp. He was told it couldn't be done and that doubt both tortured and drove him. At its heart, this is a positive story, an antidote to the macho chef culture that thrives on old ideas about leadership and success. Shewry prosecutes the compelling case for a new way forward. A bold blueprint for the restaurant - and workplace - of the future. One built on kindness, community, truth and a commitment to never give up.From National Book Award-nominee Iliana Regan, a new memoir of her life and heritage as a forager, spanning her ancestry in Eastern Europe, her childhood in rural Indiana, and her new life set in the remote forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Fieldwork explores how Regan's complex gender identity informs her acclaimed work as a chef and her profound experience of the natural world.
Not long after Iliana Regan's celebrated debut, Burn the Place, became the first food-related title in four decades to become a National Book Award nominee in 2019, her career as a Michelin star-winning chef took a sharp turn north. Long based in Chicago, she and her new wife, Anna, decided to create a culinary destination, the Milkweed Inn, located in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula, where much of the food served to their guests would be foraged by Regan herself in the surrounding forest and nearby river. Part fresh challenge, part escape, Regan's move to the forest was also a return to her rural roots, in an effort to deepen the intimate connection to nature and the land that she'd long expressed as a chef, but experienced most intensely growing up.
On her family's farm in rural Indiana, Regan was the beloved youngest in a family with three much older sisters. From a very early age, her relationship with her mother and father was shaped by her childhood identification as a boy. Her father treated her like the son he never had, and together they foraged for mushrooms, berries, herbs, and other wild food in the surrounding countryside--especially her grandfather's nearby farm, where they also fished in its pond and young Iliana explored the accumulated family treasures stored in its dusty barn. Her father would share stories of his own grandmother, Busia, who'd helped run a family inn while growing up in eastern Europe, from which she imported her own wild legends of her native forests, before settling in Gary, Indiana, and opening Jennie's Café, a restaurant that fed generations of local steelworkers. He also shared with Iliana a steady supply of sharp knives and--as she got older--guns.
Iliana's mother had family stories as well--not only of her own years marrying young, raising headstrong girls, and cooking at Jennie's, but also of her father, Wayne, who spent much of his boyhood hunting with the men of his family in the frozen reaches of rural Canada. The stories from this side of Regan's family are darker, riven with alcoholism and domestic strife too often expressed in the harm, physical and otherwise, perpetrated by men--harm men do to women and families, and harm men do to the entire landscapes they occupy.
As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigan's boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with her and Anna's efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that's suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She discovers where the wild blueberry bushes bear tiny fruit, where to gather wood sorrel, and where and when the land's different mushroom species appear--even as surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the area's birds. Along the way she struggles not only with the threat of COVID, but also with her personal and familial legacies of addiction, violence, fear, and obsession--all while she tries to conceive a child that she and her immune-compromised wife hope to raise in their new home.
With Burn the Place, Regan announced herself as a writer whose extravagant, unconventional talents matched her abilities as a lauded chef. In Fieldwork, she digs even deeper to express the meaning and beauty we seek in the landscapes, and stories, that reveal the forces which inform, shape, and nurture our lives.
From one of Sweden's most loved authors, an essayistic memoir about women and food, translated by Saskia Vogel.
Bread and Milk traces a life through food, from a bag of tangerines devoured in one sitting to the luxury of a grandmother's rice pudding, from pancakes meant to make up for a mother's absence to perfectly sliced tomatoes winning, at last, a distant father's approval; it explores how food can fill an emptiness but also consume you. After all, what we eat is inexorably intertwined with how we love.
In this radiant memoir, one of Sweden's most acclaimed writers considers the complex relationships between the women in her family as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, and how those relationships replicate themselves in fraught and obsessive relationships with food. Bread and Milk is at once wholly original and a natural extension of the brazenly intelligent and personal writing that has come to define Karolina Ramqvist's authorship.
'If Annie Ernaux and Marcel Proust had a love child it would be Bread and Milk by Karolina Ramqvist.' - Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore
'Karolina Ramqvist's writing is straight-talking scripture, a spiritual text in memoir form. Food isn't just love or its opposite; food marks time for the mortal body. Food is how people remember the people who no longer exist to make and eat food. Ramqvist's mind is transgressively pragmatic, and a constant source of enlightenment. Instead of saying, 'Look at what you didn't know, her book says, Look at what you thought you didn't know, but always did.' - Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself
'Swedish novelist Ramqvist's highly relatable memoir details the problems that can arise when a child associates food with love...The term food memoir doesn't quite encompass her profound autobiographical journey...her story, with its lush and evocative prose, will speak to many readers.' - Booklist