Culinary Biography

In 2005, Ed Levine was a freelance food writer with an unlikely dream: to control his own fate and create a different kind of food publication. He wanted to unearth the world's best bagels, the best burgers, the best hot dogs - the best of everything edible. To build something for people like him who took everything edible seriously, from the tasting menu at Per Se and omakase feasts at Nobu down to mass-market candy, fast food burgers, and instant ramen.

In his lively, unprecedented close-up portrait of Ferran Adrià, award-winning food writer Colman Andrews traces this groundbreaking chef’s rise from resort hotel dishwasher to culinary deity, and the evolution of El Bulli from a German-owned beach bar into the establishment voted annually by an international jury to be “the world’s best restaurant”.

Beneath the gloss of star chefs and crystal-laden tables, the truffle supply chain is touched by theft, secrecy, sabotage, and fraud. Farmers patrol their fields with rifles and fear losing trade secrets to spies. Hunters plant poisoned meatballs to eliminate rival truffle-hunting dogs. Naive buyers and even experts are duped by liars and counterfeits. Deeply reported and elegantly written, this exposé documents the dark, sometimes deadly crimes at each level of the truffle’s path from ground to plate, making sense of an industry that traffics in scarcity, seduction, and cash.

Jan Wong knows food is better when shared, so when she set out to write a book about home cooking in France, Italy, and China, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. While he wasn’t keen on spending excessive time with his mom, he dreamed of becoming a chef. Ultimately, it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. On their journey, Jan and Sam live and cook with locals, seeing first-hand how globalization is changing food, families, and cultures.

Despite an impressive résumé as an actor and writer, Dan Ahdoot realized that food has been the through line in the most important moments of his life. Growing up as a middle child, Ahdoot struggled to find his place in the family until he and his father discovered their shared love for la gourmandise. But when the tragic death of his brother pushed his parents to strengthen their Jewish faith and adopt a strictly kosher diet, Ahdoot and his father lost that savored connection.

When they first meet, John, a dashing European, a Latvian refugee, a physics PhD, is hoping to settle down. Michaele, a fast-talking American college student, is hungry for an independent life as a writer and historian. When they meet again some years later, Michaele is ready. Or so she thinks. And opposites attract, right?

Alice Feiring is a special sort of wine writer—the kind who dares to disagree with wine “experts”, and who believes wholeheartedly that the best wine writing is about life. To Fall in Love, Drink This is both her love letter to wine and a lifelong coming-of-age story. In a series of candid, wise, and humorous personal essays, Feiring tells the story of her parents’ divorce, her first big wine assignment, the end of an eleven-year relationship, the death of her father, a near-fatal brush with a serial killer, pandemic lockdown, and more—and suffuses each with love, romance, pain, joy, and wine.

Liz Hauck and her dad had a plan to start a weekly cooking program in a residential home for teenage boys in state care, which was run by the human services agency he co-directed. When her father died before they had a chance to get the project started, Liz decided she would try it without him. She didn’t know what to expect from volunteering with court-involved youth, but as a high school teacher she knew that teenagers are drawn to food-related activities. This is the story of what happened around the table, and how one dinner became one hundred dinners.

For aspiring chefs, seasoned cooks, or anyone with an appetite for personal growth and leadership insights, Chef's PSA: Bad Sous, Good Chef is a must-listen. It's more than just a story—it's a journey towards becoming your best self, served up in a delectable narrative that will leave you hungry for more.

In this warm collection of personal essays and recipes, best-selling author Ann Hood nourishes both our bodies and our souls. From her Italian-American childhood through raising and feeding a growing family and cooking with her new husband, food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Hood details recipes and more in Kitchen Yarns, along with tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love, and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.

Ian Purkayastha is New York City's leading truffle importer and boasts a devoted clientele of top chefs nationwide, including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, David Chang, Sean Brock, and David Bouley. But before he was purveying the world's most expensive fungus to the country's most esteemed chefs, Ian was just a food-obsessed teenager in rural Arkansas - a misfit with a peculiar fascination for rare and exotic ingredients. The son of an Indian immigrant father and a Texan mother, Ian learned to forage for wild mushrooms from an uncle in the Ozark hills.

Salt, Sweat & Steam takes listeners behind the scenes of the nation’s most elite culinary school, through perfectionistic finals and brutal unpaid internships, into days that go from continuously whisking Sauce Bernaise for 300 to being so dead-tired that dinner is a bag of Cheez-Its from the vending machine. It’s The Devil Wears Prada for the “yes, chef” era.

The Anthony Bourdain Reader has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

In this witty and candid autobiographical mock epic, Fussell survives a motherless household during the Great Depression, gets married to the well-known writer and war historian Paul Fussell after World War II, goes through a divorce, and finally escapes to New York City in her mid-50s, batterie de cuisine intact.

Here is the delicious life of one of the most beloved figures in 20th-century American culture. With a swooping voice, an incredible sense of humor, and a passion for good food, Julia Child ushered in the nation's culinary renaissance.

From one of our most interesting literary figures, former editor of Granta, former fiction editor at The New Yorker, acclaimed author of Among the Thugs, a sharp, funny, exuberant, close-up account of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook.

Reminiscing about the people and events that shaped him, David looks back at the highs and lows of his life, from his rejection of being gay and his attempt to "turn straight" through Aesthetic Realism, a cult in downtown Manhattan, to becoming a writer, cookbook author, and web publisher, to his 23-year relationship with Alan, known to millions of David's readers and listeners as "The One", which began with (what else?) food.

Restaurant kitchens have long been dominated by men, but, as of late, there has been an explosion of interest in the many women chefs who are revolutionizing the culinary game. And, alongside that interest, an accompanying appetite for smart, well-crafted culinary memoirs by female trailblazers in food. Nearly 70 years earlier, there was Alice.

For a man who has been firmly in the public eye for the past decade or more, Matt Preston has been very, very quiet about his past and private life. There are reasons for this. Now, in Big Mouth, Matt opens up about his early years for the first time—the good and the bad, the tragic and the ecstatic. Like the man himself, it's a story that's joyous, funny and larger than life. It's also, perhaps unexpectedly, filled with pathos and emotional depth, set to a pulsating 1980s soundtrack.

In 2003, Kathleen Flinn, a 36-year-old American living and working in London, returned from vacation to find that her corporate job had been eliminated. Ignoring her mother's advice that she get another job immediately or "never get hired anywhere ever again", Flinn instead cleared out her savings and moved to Paris to pursue a dream: a diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.