Culinary Biography

The communal family table bears witness to our lives. The way we approach each meal speaks volumes about who we are and what we are going through in that very moment. It’s where the spirits of those who left too soon can be conjured back to mind through taste and smell. Still, we underestimate its pull and often miss the soulful nourishment and magic that happens at sobremesa—the time spent talking after a meal—due to our increasingly busy lives.

Ian Purkayastha is New York City's leading truffle importer and boasts a devoted clientele of top chefs nationwide, including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, David Chang, Sean Brock, and David Bouley. But before he was purveying the world's most expensive fungus to the country's most esteemed chefs, Ian was just a food-obsessed teenager in rural Arkansas - a misfit with a peculiar fascination for rare and exotic ingredients. The son of an Indian immigrant father and a Texan mother, Ian learned to forage for wild mushrooms from an uncle in the Ozark hills.

This memoir derives from Kate's popular foodcentric blog, in which she shares scenes from an unusual upbringing and an unusually happy present-day life, providing an audience for this book that is already primed. That it is written by Kate Christensen means it will be a delicious reading experience in every sense - a compulsively listenable account of a knockabout life, full of sorrows and pleasures, many of the latter of the sensual, appetitive variety.

Cosmopolitan: A Bartender's Life is a memoir of the bartending life structured as a day in the life at Passerby, the bar owned and run by Toby Cecchini. It is, as well, a rich study of human nature, of the sometimes annoying, sometimes outlandish behavior of the human animal under the influence of alcohol, lust and the sheer desire to bust loose and party. It's not a pretty picture, but it's always compelling through the gimlet-eyed gaze of the author.

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 realizes that gathering at the table is just one small step toward reckoning.

An outsider within her Jersey Shore family, Chef Rossi finds a home for her punk sensibilities inside the kitchen. When their high-school-age, punk, runaway daughter is found hosting a Jersey Shore hotel party, Rossi's parents feel they have no other choice: They ship her off to live with a Hasidic rabbi in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Within the confines of this restrictive culture, Rossi's big-city dreams take root.

Felicity Cloake sets off on an epic bike ride round Britain to celebrate and investigate the legendary Great British Breakfast. She rates fry-ups on criteria from the crispness of the bacon to how long they keep her pedalling and stops for fact-based tea-breaks in place of last time’s pause café. And a woman cannot live by All Day Breakfast alone, so as well as recipes for things like Omelette Arnold Bennett or proper porridge, she will report back on the delights of regional specialities she encounters along the way.

Bobby Hutchinson, a best-selling Harlequin writer, decides to open a B & B in Vancouver, BC, when sales of romance novels falter. Despite never having stayed in a B & B and knowing absolutely nothing about running one, she jumps right in. Strange people from nearby and halfway around the world arrive at her home with their stories and struggles, not to mention their baggage, psychological and otherwise.

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.

When Anthony Bourdain died in June 2018, fans around the globe came together to celebrate the life of an inimitable man who had dedicated his life to traveling nearly everywhere (and eating nearly everything), shedding light on the lives and stories of others. Now, for the first time, we have been granted a look into Bourdain’s life through the stories and recollections of his closest friends and colleagues. Laurie Woolever, Bourdain’s long-time assistant and confidante, interviewed nearly a hundred of the people who shared Tony’s orbit.

In this wildly funny and charming memoir, Patricia Volk entertains with a unique perspective of New York in the mid- to late-twentieth century and of a bigger-than-life family that owned fourteen restaurants, including Morgen's in the garment district....

Simon Majumdar is probably not your typical idea of an immigrant. As he says, "I'm well rested, not particularly poor, and the only time I ever encounter 'huddled masses' is in line at Costco." But immigrate he did, and thanks to a Homeland Security agent who asked if he planned to make it official, the journey chronicled in Fed, White, and Blue was born. In it, Simon sets off on a trek across the United States to find out what it really means to become an American, using what he knows best: food.

A must-have anthology of the leading Black women and femmes shaping today’s food and hospitality landscape—from farm to table and beyond—chronicling their passions and motivations, lessons learned and hard-won wisdom, personal recipes, and more.

Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head on. Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish.

A new American cuisine is forming. Animals never before considered or long since forgotten are emerging as delicacies. Parts that used to be for scrap are centerpieces. Ash and hay are fashionable ingredients, and you pay handsomely to breathe flavored air. Going out to a nice dinner now often precipitates a confrontation with a fundamental question: Is that food?

“Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein’s erudite and witty audiobook about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honore de Balzac’s The Human Comedy.

When a New Jersey native moves to Minnesota, she discovers a local food movement strong enough to survive the toughest winter. Fascinating and heartfelt, this memoir demonstrates that even in a place with a short growing season, food grown locally and organically can be healthy, community-based, environmentally conscious, and - most of all - delicious.

Camas Davis was at an unhappy crossroads. A longtime magazine writer and editor in the food world, she'd returned to her home state of Oregon with her boyfriend from New York City to take an appealing job at a Portland lifestyle magazine. But neither job nor boyfriend delivered on her dreams, and in the span of a year, Davis was unemployed and on her own. Disillusioned by the years she’d spent mediating the lives of others for a living, she had no idea what to do next. She did know one thing: She no longer wanted to write about the real thing; she wanted to be the real thing.

Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. His travels took him from his hometown of New York to a tribal longhouse in Borneo, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Paris and Shanghai to the stunning desert solitude of Oman’s Empty Quarter - and many places beyond. In World Travel, a life of experience is collected into an entertaining, practical, fun and frank travel guide that gives listeners an introduction to some of his favourite places. Featuring essential advice on how to get there, what to eat, where to stay and, in some cases, what to avoid.

In Italy, five-star restaurants and celebrity chefs may seem, on the surface, a part of the landscape. In reality, the restaurant industry is as tough, cutthroat, and unforgiving as anywhere else in the world - sometimes even colluding with the shady world of organized crime. The powerful voice of Leonardo Lucarelli takes us through the underbelly of Italy's restaurant world.