Culinary Biography

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.

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.

Eddie Huang was finally happy. Sort of. He'd written a best-selling book and was the star of a TV show that took him to far-flung places around the globe. His New York City restaurant was humming, his OKCupid hand was strong, and he'd even hung fresh Ralph Lauren curtains to create the illusion of a bedroom in the tiny apartment he shared with his younger brother, Evan, who ran their restaurant business. Then he fell in love - and everything fell apart.

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.

A gritty, charming, and flavorful love letter to Los Angeles, L.A. Son is the story of Choi’s love of food and his evolution as a chef. Choi returns to his childhood afternoons at his parents’ Korean restaurant, his nights in L.A.’s gambling halls, and his pizza-fueled studying at the Culinary Institute of America before making his way into some of the best restaurants in America.

Her name is synonymous with the art of cooking. Yet few know the richly varied private life of the legendary Julia Child. Go beyond the kitchen to discover a truly American icon in Appetite for Life.

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.

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.

From the soil to the kitchen, Between Two Waters interrogates the influences on what we eat: capitalism, colonialism and gender, as well as our own personal and cultural histories. Yet it also captures with real heart all that the dinner table has to offer us: sustenance, both physical and imaginative, challenges and adventure and, most importantly, communion with others.

A culinary memoir that brings to life some of the most fascinating, glamorous food years in France and reveals gastronomical treasures from gifted artisans of the French countryside. From small cafes in Paris to Normandy, Alsace, the Basque country, and beyond, Dryansky takes us on a sweeping sensory journey, with a voice as thoughtful as Kingsolver, as entertaining as Bourdain, and as cogent and critical as Pollan.

Dessert connects us heart-to-heart like almost nothing else. It brings us together in good times and bad, celebration and solace. Desserts mark big milestones and small wins and create indelible memories of comfort and joy. And Christina Tosi, the founder and CEO of Milk Bar, believes it can save the world.

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.

The complete history of the legendary Venice landmark where Hemingway, Welles, and others were regulars. A meeting place for writers, artists, models, and the stars of stage, screen, and corporate boardrooms, a luxurious restaurant whose fabulous concoctions and timeless decor have often been imitated but never matched, Harry’s Bar in Venice has remained one of the world’s most renowned watering holes for more than 60 years.

Hunger comes to us in many forms, writes Lia Huber - we long to be satisfied not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well. Nourished invites listeners on Huber's world-roaming search to find the necessary ingredients to nurture all three.

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.

In the fall of 2009, the food world was rocked when Gourmet magazine was abruptly shuttered by its parent company. No one was more stunned by this unexpected turn of events than its beloved editor in chief, Ruth Reichl, who suddenly faced an uncertain professional future. As she struggled to process what had seemed unthinkable, Reichl turned to the one place that had always provided sanctuary. "I did what I always do when I'm confused, lonely, or frightened," she writes. "I disappeared into the kitchen."

In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there’s more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.

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.

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.

Mokhtar Alkhanshali, hijo de inmigrantes yemeníes, ha crecido en el barrio más conflictivo de San Francisco y a sus veinticuatro años es incapaz de pagarse la universidad. Mientras trabaja de portero en un bloque de pisos de lujo, descubre que el café, al igual que él, tiene su origen en Yemen, por lo que decide investigar la historia y la producción de esta antiquísima bebida viajando al país de sus antepasados.