Showing titles in Culinary

In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar opened in Manhattan's East Village. Its young chef-owner, David Chang, served ramen and pork buns to a mix of fellow restaurant cooks and confused diners whose idea of ramen was instant noodles in Styrofoam cups. It would have been impossible to know that he would become one of the most influential chefs of his generation. Full of grace, candour, grit and humour, Eat a Peach chronicles Chang's journey, laying bare his mistakes and feelings of otherness and inadequacy.

Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent 20 fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years, eluded her. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties, often for more than 100 friends and neighbors. The smells of spit-roasted lamb, apple wood smoke, and rosemary garlic marinade became necessary to her.

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.

Barbara Kingsolver opens her home to us, as she and her family attempt a year of eating only local food, much of it from their own garden. Inspired by the flavours and culinary arts of a local food culture, they explore many a farmers market and diversified organic farms at home and across the country. With characteristic warmth, Kingsolver shows us how to put food back at the centre of the political and family agenda.

In early August 1889, César Ritz, a Swiss hotelier highly regarded for his exquisite taste, found himself at the Savoy Hotel in London. He had come at the request of Richard D'Oyly Carte, the financier of Gilbert & Sullivan's comic operas, who had modernized theater and was now looking to create the world's best hotel. D'Oyly Carte soon seduced Ritz to move to London with his team, which included Auguste Escoffier, the chef de cuisine known for his elevated, original dishes.

Fireproof charts Chef Curtis Duffy's rise in spite of trauma, to being mentored by and recognized among the world's top chefs. Amid childhood chaos in rural Ohio, a young Duffy first found refuge in Home Ec class, then at one of Columbus's best restaurants, where he honed his skills. His passion ignited, Duffy was dead set on leaving Ohio and breaking the Duffy family curse. But the tragic deaths of his parents jeopardized his promising trajectories.

The country certainly boasts an outsized reputation around the world for fast food and faster living – everything is louder, brighter, bigger, if not always better – yet for all the cartoonish depictions of its culture on the big and small screen, Felicity was convinced that in reality, most Americans are just like the rest of us… despite a troubling national tendency to eat doughnuts for breakfast. Her mission; to take a closer look at the iconic American dishes that have conquered the world...

Drew Nieporent has been a staple of the New York dining scene for decades, establishing a host of iconic restaurants like Nobu, Tribeca Grill, and Montrachet. But his career started from much more humble beginnings—the grill at the local McDonald’s.

Nick's favourite thing to eat aged 10 was his mother's stroganoff and as her alcoholism worsened, he began to learn to cook it himself, gradually taking over and using it as a magic trick to conjure up the very best bits of her - the stable, sober bits, which became harder to find as the years went on. This was the beginning of a lifelong love of process and technique, of escaping into a world of hisses, blips and thunks of a knife on a board.

Erin French grew up barefoot on a farm, fell in love with food as a teenager working the line at her dad’s diner and found her calling as a professional chef at her tiny restaurant The Lost Kitchen, tucked into a 19th-century mill—now a world-renowned dining destination. In Finding Freedom in the Lost Kitchen, Erin tells her story of multiple rock-bottoms, from medical student to pregnant teen, of survival as a jobless single mother, of pills that promised release but delivered addiction, of a man who seemed to offer salvation but ripped away her very sense of self

Have you ever wondered why eating cheese can sometimes feel like a cuddle? Or how a good curry can be just what we need after a tough day? Oh, and just what is it about butter that makes us feel so at ease...? The foods we turn to behind closed doors are deeply personal, steeped in nostalgia and topped with a healthy dollop of guilty pleasure. Comfort Eating finds Grace Dent inviting listeners to her kitchen table to discover what makes the things we really eat so delicious.

Eddie Huang is the 30-year-old proprietor of Baohaus - the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night - and one of the food world’s brightest and most controversial young stars. But before he created the perfect home for himself in a small patch of downtown New York, Eddie wandered the American wilderness looking for a place to call his own. Funny, raw, and moving, and told in an irrepressibly alive and original voice, Fresh Off the Boat recasts the immigrant’s story for the 21st century.

Ruhlman propels himself and his readers through a score of kitchens and classrooms, from Asian and American regional cuisines to lunch cookery and even table waiting, in search of the elusive, unnamable elements of great cooking.

From the glamorous to the entitled, from royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who wanted to be seen—or just to gawk—at the hottest restaurants in New York City came to places Michael Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number was passed around among those who wanted to curry favor, during the decades when restaurants replaced clubs and theater as, well, theater in the most visible, vibrant city in the world. Besides dropping us back into a vanished time, Your Table Is Ready takes us places we’d never be able to get into on our own.

Anthony Bourdain, Gabrielle Hamilton, and Eric Ripert are all well established, accomplished chefs; they share their early cooking experiences, what influenced their cooking styles, and what made them want to be chefs forever. Bourdain is the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles, the author of the best-selling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and the host of the popular Food Network series, A Cook's Tour.

In this captivating memoir, the man whom Julia Child has called "the best chef in America" tells the story of his rise from a frightened apprentice in an exacting Old World kitchen to an Emmy Award-winning superstar who taught millions of Americans how to cook and shaped the nation's tastes in the bargain. The Apprentice is the poignant and sometimes funny tale of a boy's coming of age. Beyond that, it is the story of America's culinary awakening and the transformation of food from an afterthought to a national preoccupation.

Victory in the Kitchen is a culinary biography: a life lived through food, ranging from rural Berkshire to wartime London, via Belle Epoque Paris and prohibition-era New York. While Georgina Landemare saw herself as ordinary, her accomplishments, and the life she lived, were anything but. She started her career as a nursemaid and ended it cooking for one of the best-known figures in British history, Winston Churchill, a man to whom food was central as a diplomatic tool in a time when the world was embroiled in a worldwide war.

Provence, 1970 is about a singular historic moment. In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, the iconic culinary figures James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Richard Olney, Simone Beck, and Judith Jones found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery.

When Dominique Crenn was awarded three Michelin Stars in 2018 for her influential San Francisco restaurant Atelier Crenn, she became the first female chef in the United States to receive this highly coveted honor. Filled with stories from the years Crenn spent working in the male-centric world of professional kitchens, tracking her career from struggling cook to being named the World’s Best Female Chef, starring on Netflix's Chef's Table, and running one of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants, Rebel Chef is disarmingly honest and revealing.

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.