Culinary Biography

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.

When listeners left Ruth at the end of Tender at the Bone, she was in Berkeley, California, working as a chef at the Swallow restaurant. Comfort Me with Apples picks up in 1978; Ruth is still living in a commune with her husband, Doug, but she’s decided to put down her chef’s toque and embark on a career as a restaurant critic. After a bumpy start (at the end of her very first on-the-job dinner, her credit card is unceremoniously rejected), she is soon visiting restaurants all over the world in search of a meal to write home about.

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.

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.

In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother's copies of Fu Pei-mei's Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu's story and in her food, a portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class female home cooks navigated the postwar transformations taking place across the world.

The long-awaited memoir from cultural icon and culinary standard bearer Alice Waters recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of what is arguably America's most influential restaurant. In Coming to My Senses, Alice retraces the events that led her to 1517 Shattuck Avenue and the tumultuous times that emboldened her to find her own voice as a cook when the prevailing food culture was embracing convenience and uniformity.

It was Rachel Signer's dream to be that girl: the one smoking hand-rolled cigarettes out the windows of her 19th-century Parisian studio apartment, wearing secondhand Isabel Marant jeans and sipping a glass of Beaujolais redolent of crushed roses with a touch of horse mane. Instead she was an under-appreciated freelance journalist and waitress in New York City, frustrated at always being broke and completely miserable in love. When she tastes her first pétillant-naturel (pét-nat for short), it sets her on a journey of self-discovery.

When it opened a decade ago, the acclaimed Los Angeles speakeasy The Varnish - owned, designed, and managed by award-winning cocktail aficionado Eric Alperin - quickly became the stylish standard bearer for modern bars. Unvarnished is a candid, voice-driven, no-holds-barred look at the workings of a bar, and the foundation of The Varnish’s success: attention to hospitality and an abiding belief in the nobility of service.

McSorley's Old Ale House has been serving light and dark ale on the Bowery in New York City's East Village since 1854. Although a Supreme Court ruling forced them to allow women inside in the 1970s, many of the bar's quirks have been constant for over a century, down to the newspaper-covered walls, Houdini's handcuffs, the raw onions, and its sawdust-strewn floors. But it's not just the decorations and attitude that stayed the same; it's the people who work and drink there. Rafe Bartholomew's father has been a bartender there for 40 years.

From Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben to the Jolly Green Giant and Ronald McDonald, corporate icons sell billions of dollars’ worth of products. But only one of them was ever a real person—Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken/KFC. From a 1930s roadside café in Corbin, Kentucky, Harland Sanders launched a fried chicken business that now circles the globe, serving “finger lickin’ good” chicken to more than 12 million people every day.

From the humble hotplate of her one-room apartment to the crowded kitchens of bustling parties, Colwin regales us with tales of meals gone both magnificently well and disastrously wrong. Hilarious, personal, and full of Colwin’s hard-won expertise, Home Cooking will speak to the heart of any amateur cook, professional chef, or food lover.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Born in Pula, on the Istrian peninsula, Lidia grew up surrounded by love and security, learning the art of Italian cooking from her beloved grandmother. But when Istria was annexed by a communist regime, Lidia’s family fled to Trieste, where they spent two years in a refugee camp waiting for visas to enter the United States. When she finally arrived in New York, Lidia soon began working in restaurants, the first step on a path that led to her becoming one of the most revered chefs and businesswomen in the country.

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.

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.

Before Chef Aaron Sanchez rose to fame on shows like MasterChef and Chopped, he was a restless Mexican-American son, raised by a fiercely determined and talented woman who was a successful chef and restaurateur in her own right. In this memoir, Sanchez delves into his formative years with remarkable candor, injecting his story with adrenaline and revealing how he fell in love with cooking and started a career in the fast-paced culinary world.