Culinary Memoir

Anthony Bourdain was an American celebrity chef, author, travel documentarian, and television personality who starred in programs focusing on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition. He was considered one of the most influential chefs in the world.

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.

Long based in Chicago, Iliana 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 had long expressed as a chef, but experienced most intensely growing up.

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.

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.

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.

Burt, the hound of Beelzebub, has risen from the dead; Gadget, the miniature horse, has moved into the kitchen; and Tommy has decided to expand his beer business and on the advice of his wife, Rose, is thinking about distilling gin. What can possibly go wrong? With Brexit looming, a second baby on the way and sales of IPA beer plummeting, trouble is brewing in the Loire.

During a 30-year boom period in France between the end of World War II and the 1974 oil crisis, Paris was not only the world's most delicious, stylish, and exciting tourist destination; it was also the world capital of gastronomic genius and innovation. The Gourmands' Way explores the lives and writings of six Americans who chronicled the food and wine of this era, paying particular attention to their individual struggles as writers, to their life circumstances, and to their particular genius at sharing awareness of French food with mainstream American audiences.

My Berlin Kitchen tells the story of how one thoroughly confused, kitchen-mad romantic broke off her engagement, quit her dream job, and went across the ocean in search of happiness. Luisa Weiss was working in New York after college and living with her future fiancé when she decided to bake, roast, and stew her way through the huge collection of recipes she’d been clipping and hoarding for years. The blog she wrote to document her adventures, The Wednesday Chef, soon became a sensation. But she never stopped longing for her childhood home in Berlin.

In The Food and Wine of France, influential food writer Edward Behr investigates French cuisine and what it means, in encounters from Champagne to Provence. He tells the stories of French artisans and chefs who continue to work at the highest level. Many people in and out of France have noted for a long time the slow retreat of French cuisine, concerned that it is losing its important place in the country's culture and in the world culture of food. And yet, as Behr writes, good French food remains very, very delicious.

A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.

In The Wine Lover's Daughter, Anne Fadiman examines - with all her characteristic wit and feeling - her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine. An appreciation of wine - along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature - was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman's escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire.

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.

Nobu needs no introduction. One of the world's most widely acclaimed restaurateurs, his influence on food and hospitality can be found at the highest levels of haute-cuisine to the food trucks you frequent during the work week. But now, we are finally introduced to the private Nobu, and what makes Nobu special, and what made him famous, is the spirit of what exists on these pages. He shows us repeatedly that success is as much about perseverance in the face of adversity as it is about innate talent.

>Starting with the Thanksgiving turkey that never quite finishes cooking, then moving to the polenta that unceremoniously goes runny and the guests who arrive a day early - there is no topic Tess Rafferty fails to encounter, or hilariously recount. Recipes for Disaster is as though Bridget Jones wrote a culinary narrative - the most pristine of intentions slowly disappear, as does the wine, along with any hope of a seamless and well-orchestrated dinner party.

It all began when Pat LaFrieda’s great-grandfather Anthony LaFrieda decided to pack up and move his family from Italy to New York in search of a better life, setting up the family’s first retail butcher shop in 1922 in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Almost 100 years later, Pat LaFrieda, a fourth-generation butcher and third-generation meat purveyor, is at the helm of a family-run business that has been providing meat to customers for decades.

It's the untold story of the renegade burger chain that evokes a passionate following unlike any other. In fast-food corporate America, In-N-Out Burger stands apart. Begun in a tiny shack in the shadow of World War II, this family-owned chain has steadfastly refused to franchise or be sold. It is a testament to old-fashioned values and reminiscent of a simpler time when people, loyalty, and a freshly made, juicy hamburger meant something.

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.

Sasha Martin set herself a rather ambitious goal: to cook - and eat - her way around the world, with 196 recipes from196 countries in 196 weeks. Enter Global Table Adventure, a project that proves to be more than just a culinary challenge as Sasha attempts to navigate the vicissitudes of marriage, motherhood, and life's failures and successes, all inextricably linked to her troubled past.

In the Technicolor glow of the early 70s, Jessica B. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan's West Side to the restaurants of the Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day - luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. My Soul Looks Back is her paean to that fascinating social circle and the depth of their shared commitment to activism, intellectual engagement, and each other.