The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain · 320 pages

A celebrity chef shares anecdotes of his experience in the restaurant industry, and of his journey from dishwasher to a position of fame in the food industry.

Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage

Molly Wizenberg · 241 pages

"When Molly Wizenberg married Brandon Pettit, she vowed always to support him, to work with him to make their hopes and dreams real. She evinced enthusiasm about Brandon's enthusiasms: building a violin, building a boat, and opening an ice cream store--none of which came to pass. So when Brandon started making plans to open a pizza restaurant, Molly felt sure that the restaurant would join the lis

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School

Kathleen Flinn · 304 pages

About the Book Recounts the author's decision to change careers and attend the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, an education during which she survived the program's intense teaching methods, competitive fellow students, and the dynamics of falling in love, in an account complemented by two dozen recipes. Edition Notes Originally published: New York : Viking, 2007. Inclu

Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line

Michael Gibney

The back must slave to feed the belly. In this urgent and unique book, chef Michael Gibney uses twenty-four hours to animate the intricate camaraderie and culinary choreography in an upscale New York restaurant kitchen. Here readers will find all the details, in rapid-fire succession, of what it takes to deliver an exceptional plate of food -- the journey to excellence by way of exhaustion. Told i

Yes, Chef

Marcus Samuelsson · 327 pages

"It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Mar

Life, on the Line: A Chef's Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat

Grant Achatz, Nick Kokonas

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Gabrielle Hamilton · 291 pages

32 Yolks

Eric Ripert · 251 pages

"Before he earned his third Michelin star at his iconic restaurant, Le Bernardin, the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef of the Year, became a regular guest judge on Bravo's Top Chef, even before he knew how to make a proper omelet, Eric Ripert was a young boy in the South of France who felt that his world had come to an end. At the age of five, his parents went through a bitter divorce. Eric

Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste

Bianca Bosker · 450 pages

A tech reporter describes her introduction to the world of master sommeliers and her in-depth investigation into the source of their interests and skills, an effort marked by work with elite tasting groups, encounters at exclusive New York restaurants, visits to California winemakers and more.--

My Life in France

Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme · 344 pages

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the coun

Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table

Ruth Reichl · 320 pages

Warm, very descriptive of mouth watering food interspersed with receipes. A story of food and her life which was quite an exciting one of a restaurant critic.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

Michael Pollan · 480 pages

"Fire, water, air, earth--our most trusted food expert recounts the story of his culinary education In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements--fire, water, air, and earth--to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession o

Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir

Eddie Huang · 276 pages

The author is the thirty-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, he wandered the American wild

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer · 341 pages

After spending much of his life shifting between various omnivore and herbivore eating habits, the author presents a thought provoking look at why and how humans choose their diets. Delivering the pros and cons of eating meat, he invites readers on an insightful exploration into the many facets of food. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work,

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip-Confessions of a Cynical Waiter

Steve Dublanica · 302 pages

Taken from the popular blog, WaiterRant.net, tells the story from the server's point of view about customer stupidity, arrogance, misbehavior and even human grace.

It Must've Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything

Jeffrey Steingarten · 448 pages

In this outrageous and delectable new volume, the Man Who Ate Everything proves that he will do anything to eat everything. That includes going fishing for his own supply of bluefin tuna belly; nearly incinerating his oven in pursuit of the perfect pizza crust, and spending four days boning and stuffing three different fowl--into each other-- to produce the Cajun specialty called "turducken." It M

Ivan Ramen: Love, Obsession, and Recipes from Tokyo's Most Unlikely Noodle Joint

Ivan Orkin · 211 pages

"The end-all-be-all guide to ramen from Ivan Orkin, the iconoclastic New York-born owner of Tokyo's top ramen shop. While scores of people line up outside American ramen powerhouses like Momofuku Noodle Bar, chefs and food writers in the know revere Ivan Orkin's traditional Japanese take on ramen. Ivan Ramen chronicles Orkin's journey from dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker to the chef and owner of one o

The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

Michael Paterniti · 349 pages

In the picturesque village of Guzma n, Spain, in a cave on the edge of town, there is a cramped limestone chamber known as "the telling room." This is where villagers have gathered for centuries to share their stories and secrets--usually accompanied by copious amounts of wine. It was here, in the summer of 2000, that Michael Paterniti found himself listening to a Spanish cheesemaker as he spun an

Five Quarters of the Orange

Joanne Harris · 307 pages

When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation years ago. But the past and present are inextricably entwined, particularly in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise has inherited from her mother. And soon Framboise will reali

L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food

Roy Choi, Tien Nguyen, Natasha Phan · 340 pages

"Los Angeles: A patchwork megalopolis defined by its unlikely cultural collisions; the city that raised and shaped Roy Choi, the boundary-breaking chef who decided to leave behind fine dining to feed the city he loved--and, with the creation of the Korean taco, reinvented street food along the way. Abounding with both the food and the stories that gave rise to Choi's inspired cooking, L.A. Son tak

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

Julie Powell · 307 pages

Julie Powell thought cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the craziest thing she'd ever do--until she embarked on the voyage recounted in her new memoir, CLEAVING.Her marriage challenged by an insane, irresistible love affair, Julie decides to leave town and immerse herself in a new obsession: butchery. She finds her way to Fleischer's, a butcher shop where

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

Bill Buford · 336 pages

Writer Buford's memoir of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook. Expanding on his award-winning New Yorker article, Buford gives us a chronicle of his experience as "slave" to Mario Batali in the kitchen of Batali's three-star New York restaurant, Babbo. He describes three frenetic years of trials and errors, disappointments and triumphs, as he worked his way up the Babbo ladder

Aftertaste

Daria Lavelle · 400 pages

Sourdough

Robin Sloan · 272 pages

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Loi