Culinary Memoir

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the James Beard Award–winning blogger behind The Everywhereist come hilarious, searing essays on how food and cooking stoke the flames of her feminism. “With charm and humor, Geraldine DeRuiter welcomes us into her personal history and thus reconnects us with...

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 Melbourne restaurant Attica into the league of the most innovative, acclaimed dining experiences in the world, and one of the most vital in Australian history.

When the world becomes overwhelming, Ella Risbridger focuses on the little things that bring her joy, like enjoying a glass of wine when cooking, FaceTiming with a friend whilst making bagels and sharing recipes that are good for the soul. One night she found herself lying on her kitchen floor, wondering if she would ever get up - and it was the thought of a chicken, of roasting it, and of eating it, that got her to her feet and made her want to be alive.

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME The back must slave to feed the belly. . . . In this urgent and unique book, chef Michael Gibney uses twenty-four hours to animate the intricate camaraderie and culinary choreography in an upscale New York restaurant kitchen. Here...

Aujourd'hui, chaque entreprise peut faire le choix de l'hospitalité. Ce recueil de leçons sur le service et le leadership, apprises au cours d'une carrière dans l'hôtellerie, célèbre le seul principe qui ne sera jamais démodé : le désir humain d'être pris en charge. Dans cet aperçu des coulisses du monde de la restauration, L'hospitalité déraisonnable nous montre comment trouver de la magie dans ce que nous faisons - pour nous-mêmes, pour les personnes avec lesquelles nous travaillons et pour celles que nous écoutons.

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.

Craig was the last person anyone would have expected to open an American diner in Paris. He came from humble beginnings in a working-class town in Connecticut, had never worked in a restaurant, and didn't know anything about starting a brand-new business. But from his first visit to Paris, Craig knew he had found the city of his dreams. Pancakes in Paris is the story of Craig tackling the impossible - from raising the money to fund his dream to tracking down international suppliers for "exotic" American ingredients, and even finding love along the way.

After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, writer Kathleen Flinn returned with no idea what to do next, until one day at a supermarket she watched a woman loading her cart with ultraprocessed foods. Flinn's "chefternal" instinct kicked in: she persuaded the stranger to reload with fresh foods, offering her simple recipes for healthy, easy meals.

Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. After a childhood spent dining everywhere from Le Pavillion to La Grenouille, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical, from the rare game birds she served at elaborate dinner parties in an apartment so tiny that guests couldn’t turn around to the eight timbale molds she bought while working at Dean & DeLuca, just so she could make tall food.

According to The Waiter, 80 percent of customers are nice people just looking for something to eat. The remaining 20 percent, however, are socially maladjusted psychopaths.

Waiter Rant offers the server's unique point of view, replete with tales of customer stupidity, arrogant misbehavior, and unseen bits of human grace transpiring in the most unlikely places.

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.

In this poignant, delicious memoir, American tax preparer and food writer Steve Hoffman tells the story of how he and his family move to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about food, wine, and learning how to belong. Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable...

Even before Susan Herrmann Loomis wrote her now-classic memoir, On Rue Tatin, Americans have been compelled by books about the French's ease with cooking. With In a French Kitchen, Loomis—an expat who long ago traded her American grocery store for a bustling French farmer's market—demystifies in lively prose the seemingly effortless je ne sais quoi behind a simple French meal.

Read Kathleen Flinn's posts on the Penguin Blog. This is the funny and inspiring account of Kathleen Flinn’s struggle in a stew of hot-tempered chefs, competitive classmates, her own “wretchedly inadequate” French, and the basics of French cuisine. Flinn was a thirty-six-year-old middle...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South tells his own story this time. Of growing up in a house wrecked by violence and a South haunted by racism. And of how his search for home led him to find escape and belonging through food. Until he...

A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families...

Years ago, when O. Henry Prize-winning writer Crystal Wilkinson was baking a jam cake, she felt her late grandmother's presence. She soon realized that she was not the only cook in her kitchen; there were her ancestors, too, stirring, measuring, and braising alongside her. These are her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black women who settled in Appalachia and made a life, a legacy, and a cuisine. An expert cook, Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes rooted deep in the past, full of flavor—delicious favorites.

In Paris for a weekend visit, Elizabeth Bard sat down to lunch with a handsome Frenchman - and never went home again. Was it love at first sight? Or was it the way her knife slid effortlessly through her pavé au poivre, the steak's pink juices puddling into the buttery pepper sauce? Lunch in Paris is a memoir about a young American woman caught up in two passionate love affairs - one with her new beau, Gwendal, the other with French cuisine.

Mark H. Brezinski is a forty-five-year veteran of the dynamic restaurant industry. A graduate of the famed School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, Mark went on to create or co-create multiple nationally acclaimed restaurant companies. His experiences span the globe in search of culinary discoveries and inspirations with industry icons like the late Norman Brinker, Paul Fleming, Phil Romano, and chefs Michael Mina and Mark Miller. This book takes you to all of these places and more, while telling behind-the-scenes stories.

For more than 30 years, Patience Gray, author of the celebrated cookbook Honey from a Weed, lived in a remote area of Puglia in southernmost Italy. She lived without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone, grew much of her own food, and gathered and ate wild plants alongside her neighbors in this economically impoverished region. She was fond of saying that she wrote only for herself and her friends, yet her growing reputation brought a steady stream of international visitors to her door.