Culinary Biography

This memoir is laced with wonderful stories about the French character, particularly in the world of food, and the way of life that Julia Child embraced so wholeheartedly. Above all, she reveals the kind of spirit and determination, the sheer love of cooking, and the drive to share that with her fellow Americans that made her the extraordinary success she became.

In 2007 chef Grant Achatz seemingly had it made. He had been named one of the best new chefs in America by Food & Wine in 2002, received the James Beard Foundation Rising Star Chef of the Year Award in 2003, and in 2005 he and Nick Kokonas opened the conceptually radical restaurant Alinea, which was named Best Restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine. Then, Achatz was diagnosed with stage IV squamous cell carcinoma - tongue cancer.

A rags-to-$9-billion-riches story. A crash course in Burger King history and fast food in America, The Burger King is McLamore's candid and conversational memoir. Written before his death in 1996, he talks of his life, the birth of the Whopper, and the rise of Burger King. McLamore's account of Burger King offers an instructive and inspiring tale to young entrepreneurs. Here's a story of entrepreneurship development from one of the top entrepreneurs of fast food chains.

In her long-awaited memoir, Ina Garten—aka the Barefoot Contessa, author of thirteen bestselling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and cultural icon—shares her personal story with those hungry for a seat at her table. Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail.

Culinary Leverage: A Journey Through the Heat is about exposing the dysfunction of an industry through the eyes of a highly decorated chef who, through hard-won experience, resilience and grief, soul searching and moments of reckoning, finds a healthier way forward, not just for himself but for the restaurant business as a whole.

Craig Carlson set out to do the impossible: open the first American diner in Paris. Despite never having owned his own business before - let alone a restaurant, the riskiest business of all - Craig chose to open his diner in a foreign country, with a foreign language that also happens to be the culinary capital of the world. While facing enormous obstacles, Craig and his diner, Breakfast in America, went on to be a great success - especially with the French.

Professional journalist and amateur drinker Bianca Bosker didn’t know much about wine - until she discovered an alternate universe where taste reigns supreme, a world of elite sommeliers who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of flavor. Astounded by their fervor and seemingly superhuman sensory powers, she set out to uncover what drove their obsession and whether she, too, could become a “cork dork”.

Don't be a Donkey is a true story about the life and career of Chef Chadd McArthur. It is about the lessons, about both kitchen and life, that he learned while working for Gordon Ramsay. Eighteen hours a day, five days a week...when you work with a great chef and leader that much, his wisdom will rub off on you, and at times traumatize you.

Phyllis Grant's Everything Is Under Control is a memoir about appetite as it comes, goes, and refocuses its object of desire. Grant's story follows the sometimes smooth, sometimes jagged, always revealing contours of her life: from her days as a dancer struggling to find her place at Julliard, to her experiences in and out of four-star kitchens in New York City, to falling in love with her future husband and leaving the city after 9/11 for California, where her children are born.

A is for Aronia, berry member of the apple family, clothes-stainer, super-fruit with reputed healing power. D is for Durian, endowed with a dramatic rind and a shifting odor - peaches, old garlic. M is for Medlar, name-checked by Shakespeare for its crude shape, beloved by gardeners for its flowers. In this work of unique invention, these and other difficult fruits serve as the central ingredients of 26 lyrical essays that range from deeply personal to botanical, from culinary to medical, from humorous to philosophical.

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.

In August 2009, Colin Hagendorf set out to review every regular slice of pizza in Manhattan, and his blog, Slice Harvester, was born. Two years and nearly 400 slices later, he'd been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Daily News (New York), and on radio shows all over the country. Suddenly, this self-proclaimed punk who was barely making a living doing burrito delivery and selling handmade zines had a following.

When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America’s oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone’s boss. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no? This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat.

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.

When the Saulnier sisters suffer one disappointment too many in their native France, they decide to pack up and try their luck in America. As journalists, they have the run of the country, following stories that take them to places where most Americans have never been - from the back roads of Appalachia to an underground village of homeless people in the New York City subway system. And along the way, they dine on: Nathan's Famous hot dogs at the annual hot dog-eating contest in Coney Island.

Stanley Tucci grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the kitchen table. He shared the magic of those meals with us in The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, and now he takes us beyond the savory recipes and into the compelling stories behind them.​ Taste is a reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about his growing up in Westchester, New York.

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.

O lugar da Paola Carosella sempre foi a cozinha – até que a fama, a pressão do julgamento constante e a polarização política no país que ela escolheu para viver tiraram até isso dela. Na tentativa de achar um caminho de volta, a renomada chef de cozinha e apresentadora achou as respostas que ela procurava nos livros de uma ensaísta norte-americana: M.F.K. Fisher.

Food has always been an integral part of Stanley Tucci’s life: from stracciatella soup served in the shadow of the Pantheon, to marinara sauce cooked between scene rehearsals and costume fittings, to home-made pizza eaten with his children before bedtime. Now, in What I Ate in One Year Tucci records twelve months of eating—in restaurants, kitchens, film sets, press junkets, at home and abroad, with friends, with family, with strangers, and occasionally just by himself.

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.