Culinary Memoir

From his first apprenticeship in France to his Michelin-starred restaurant empire, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s cuisine is inspired by the freshest ingredients, the simplest techniques, and the drive to make the ordinary perfect. It all started at home. JGV is an invitation into the kitchen with a master chef. With humor and heart, Jean-Georges looks back on success and failure, sharing stories of cooking with legendary chefs Paul Bocuse and Louis Outhier, traveling in search of new and revelatory flavors, and building menus of his own.

From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, re-tracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Providing a glimpse into a life that has intertwined food and travel in exciting and unexpected ways, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age of a voracious eater and his eventual ascension to become, as he puts it, “a professional glutton.”

Treated Like Family details the development of Sargento - a nationally recognized cheese company and household name. At the same time, it's a timeless story that showcases the importance of the individual and how a family united in a single purpose within the right culture is unstoppable.

Out of Line describes Lynch's remarkable process of self-invention, including her encounters with colorful characters of the food world, and vividly evokes the magic of creation in the kitchen. It is also a love letter to South Boston and its vanishing culture, governed by Irish Catholic mothers and its own code of honor. Through her story, Lynch explores how the past - both what we strive to escape from and what we remain true to - can strengthen and expand who we are.

Growing up in a vegetarian family, Tara Austen Weaver never thought she’d stray. But as an adult, she found herself in poor health and, after trying cures of every kind, a doctor finally ordered her to eat meat. Warily, she ventured into the butcher shop, and as the man behind the counter wrapped up her first-ever chicken, she found herself intrigued. Eventually, he dared her to cook her way through his meat counter.

As a lifelong eater, Blount always got along easily with food - he didn't have to think, he just ate. But food doesn't exist in a vacuum; there's the global climate and the global economy to consider, not to mention Blount's chronic sinusitis, which constricts his sense of smell and, consequently, his taste buds. So while he's always frowned on eating with an ulterior motive, times have changed. Save Room for Pie grapples with these and other food-related questions in Blount's signature style.

This is the story of a man, a cow, and a question: What am I eating? After realizing he knows more about the television on his wall than the food on his plate, award-winning TV producer and amateur chef Jared Stone buys 420 pounds of beef directly from a rancher and embarks on a hilarious and inspiring culinary adventure. With the help of an incredibly supportive wife and a cadre of highly amused friends, Jared offers a glimpse at one man's family as they try to learn about their food and ask themselves what's really for dinner.

America is in the midst of a meat zeitgeist. Butchers have emerged as the rock stars of the culinary world, and cozy gastropubs serving up pork belly, lamb burgers, and sweetbreads rule the restaurant scene. If butchers are our new rock stars, then Berlin Reed is their front man. Through the lens of Berlin's personal story, The Ethical Butcher educates listeners about how they can improve the meat industry by participating in it.

In the 1970s, New York City was plagued by crime, filth, and an ineffective government. The city was falling apart, and even the newly constructed World Trade Center threatened to be a fiasco. But in April 1976, a quarter-mile up on the 107th floor of the North Tower, a new restaurant called Windows on the World opened its doors - a glittering sign that New York wasn't done just yet. In The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World, journalist Tom Roston tells the complete history of this incredible restaurant, from its stunning $14-million opening to 9/11 and its tragic end.

Bobby Hutchinson, a best-selling Harlequin writer, decides to open a B & B in Vancouver, BC, when sales of romance novels falter. Despite never having stayed in a B & B and knowing absolutely nothing about running one, she jumps right in. Strange people from nearby and halfway around the world arrive at her home with their stories and struggles, not to mention their baggage, psychological and otherwise.

For Amy Ettinger, ice cream is not just a delicious snack but a circumstance and a time of year - frozen forever in memory. As the youngest child and only girl, ice cream embodied unstructured summers, freedom from the tyranny of her classmates, and a comforting escape from her chaotic, demanding family. Now as an adult and journalist, her love of ice cream has led to a fascinating journey to understand ice cream's evolution and enduring power, complete with insight into the surprising history behind America's early obsession with ice cream.

In this entertaining, informative, and thoroughly unconventional wine guide, award-winning sommelier, winemaker, and wine educator André Mack presents listeners with the 99 bottles that have most impacted his life. Instead of just pairing wines with foods, Mack pairs practical information with personal stories, offering up recommendations alongside reflections on being one of the only African-Americans to ever work at the top level of the American wine industry. The 99 bottles range from highly accessible commercial wines to the most rarefied Bordeaux....

America is more than just a fast food nation. Food Americana is the inside story of how generations of Americans have formed a national cuisine with tastes from all over the world. Fried chicken was a distinctly Southern dish - now it's the Sunday night special at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. A Utah restaurant won Maine's annual Best Lobster Roll competition. And perhaps the ultimate all-American dish, pizza, is served up in 30 different styles, a total of three billion pies a year, an average of 23 pounds for each of us.

This is the story of how one expat woman left her beloved behind when she moved to France - her beloved kale, that is. Unable to find le chou kale anywhere upon moving to the City of Light with her new husband, and despite not really speaking French, Kristen Beddard launched a crusade to single-handedly bring kale to the country of croissants and cheese.

Chefs at top restaurants face competing pressures to deliver complex and creative dishes, and navigate market forces to run a profitable business in an industry with exceptionally high costs and low profit margins. Creating a distinctive and original culinary style allows them to stand out in the market, but making the familiar food that many customers want ensures that they can stay in business.

The powerful yet touching memoir of a Chinese-American woman and her grandmother by an extraordinarily talented author who has been compared to Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Leslie Li belongs to the illustrious Li family of Guilin, China. Her paternal grandfather, Li Zongren, was China's first elected vice president, to whom Chiang Kai-shek left control of the country when he fled to Formosa. Leslie's father was studying in the US when he met and married her American-born mother.

Food writer Hannah Howard is at a pivotal moment in her life when she begins searching out her fellow food people - women who’ve carved a place for themselves in a punishing, male-dominated industry. Women whose journeys have inspired and informed Hannah’s own foodie quests. On trips that take her from Milan to Bordeaux to Oslo and then always back again to her home in New York City, Hannah spends time with these influential women, learning about the intimate paths that led them each toward fulfilling careers.

Feasting her way through an Italian honeymoon, Jen Lin-Liu was struck by culinary echoes of the delicacies she ate and cooked back in China, where she’d lived for more than a decade. Who really invented the noodle? she wondered, like many before her. But also: How had food and culture moved along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route linking Asia to Europe - and what could still be felt of those long-ago migrations?

What goes into the making of a chef, a restau­rant, a dish? In his highly anticipated first book, influential chef Peter Hoffman offers thoughtful and delectable answers to these questions. Hoffman tells the story of his upbringing, professional education, and evolution as a chef and restaurant owner through its components—everything from the importance of your relationship with your refrigerator repairman and an account of how a burger killed his restaurant, to his belief in peppers as a perfect food.

A county government in the state of Maryland doesn't want a chitlin market in their area, declaring chitlins a "negative racial stereotype". All Shauna Anderson wants is a restaurant where she can greet and serve her loyal following. While fighting off her enemies, Shauna becomes a close friend with her young, handsome restaurant contractor. They quickly discover multiple personality disorders in one another, brought on for both by childhood traumas. Together, the two of them fight vandals, crooked inspectors, doubting friends, and shady neighbors.