Restaurant Reads
Top 10 Restaurant Reads
: Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, Over Easy, From Here, You Can't See Paris: Seasons of a French Village and Its Restaurant, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Customer is Always Wrong, Love Me Back
Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
| Author | Ruth Reichl |
| ISBN | 0143036610 |
Ruth Reichl, world-renowned food critic and editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, knows a thing or two about food. She also knows that as the most important food critic in the country, you need to be anonymous when reviewing some of the most high-profile establishments in the biggest restaurant town...
Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Blood, Bones & Butter follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years: the rural...
The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant
| Author | Judy Rodgers |
| ISBN | 0393020436 |
In The Zuni Café Cookbook, a book customers have been anticipating for years, chef and owner Judy Rodgers provides recipes for Zuni's most well-known dishes, ranging from the Zuni Roast Chicken to the Espresso Granita. But Zuni's appeal goes beyond recipes. Harold McGee concludes, "What makes The...
Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table
| Author | Ruth Reichl |
| ISBN | 0767903382 |
At an early age, Ruth Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world. . . . If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Her deliciously crafted memoir, Tender at the Bone, is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in equal measure by a passion...
| Author | Mimi Pond |
| ISBN | 1770461531 |
A fast-paced semi-memoir about diners, drugs, and California in the 1970s.
Over Easy is a brilliant portrayal of a familiar coming-of-age story. After being denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret finds salvation from the straightlaced world of college and the...
| Author | Michael S. Sanders |
| ISBN | 0060959207 |
From Here,You Can't See Paris is a sweet, leisurely exploration of the life of Les Arques (population 159), a hilltop village in a remote corner of France, untouched by the modern era. It is a story of a dying village's struggle to survive, of a dead artist whose legacy began its rebirth, and of chef Jacques...
Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
| Author | Ruth Reichl |
| ISBN | 0375758739 |
In this delightful sequel to her bestseller Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl returns with more tales of love, life, and marvelous meals. Comfort Me with Apples picks up Reichl's story in 1978, when she puts down her chef's toque and embarks on a career as a restaurant critic. Her pursuit of good food and...
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
| Author | Anne Tyler |
| ISBN | 0449911594 |
Through every family run memories which bind it together - despite everything. The Tulls of Baltimore are no exception. Abandoned by her salesman husband, Pearl is left to bring up her three children alone - Cody, a flawed devil, Ezra, a flawed saint, and Jenny, errant and passionate. Now as Pearl lies...
The Customer is Always Wrong
| Author | Mimi Pond |
| ISBN | 1770462821 |
A young woman's art career begins to lift off as those around her succumb to addiction and alcoholism
The Customer is Always Wrong is the saga of a young naive artist named Madge working in a restaurant of charming drunks, junkies, thieves, and creeps. Oakland in the late seventies is a cheap...
| Author | Merritt Tierce |
| ISBN | 0385538073 |
From "5 Under 35" honoree and Rona Jaffe Award-winner comes an urgent, intensely visceral debut novel about a young waitress whose downward spiral is narrated in electric prose
Marie, a young single mother, lands a job at an upscale Dallas steakhouse. She is preternaturally attuned to the...
This is the true story of a trip to the beach that never ends. It's about a husband and wife who escape civilization to build a small restaurant on an island paradise -- and discover that even paradise has its pitfalls. It's a story filled with calamities and comedy, culinary disasters and triumphs, and...
Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress
| Author | Debra Ginsberg |
| ISBN | 0060932813 |
A veteran waitress dishes up a spicy and robust account of life as it really exists behind kitchen doors.
Part memoir, part social commentary, part guide to how to behave when dining out, Debra Ginsberg's book takes readers on her twentyyear journey as a waitress at a soap-operatic Italian...
| Author | Amanda Eyre Ward |
| ISBN | 0553390503 |
In this heartrending and poignant novel, award-winning author Amanda Eyre Ward tells the story of Alice Conroe, a forty year old Texas barbecue owner who has the perfect life, except she and her husband long for a child. Unable to conceive, she’s trying desperately to adopt but her destiny is quickly...
| Author | Richard Russo |
| ISBN | 0375412867 |
Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series—and reissued now in hardcover alongside his masterful new novel, Empire Falls—Richard Russo’s Mohawk remains today as it was described then: A first novel with all the assurance of a mature writer at the peak of form...
The Tea House on Mulberry Street
| Author | Sharon Owens |
| ISBN | 0515139947 |
Muldoon's Tea Rooms--and the 17-year marriage of proprietors Penny and Daniel Stanley--are fading. But a perpetually dieting housewife still comes in to escape her husband's stick-thin mistress, a struggling artist pens love letters to actor Nicolas Cage, and a woman returns to search for a long-lost...
| Author | Agnès Desarthe |
| ISBN | 0143113232 |
At forty-three, Myriam has been a wife, mother, and lover—but never a restauranteur. When she opens Chez Moi in a quiet neighborhood in Paris, she has no idea how to run a business, but armed only with her love of cooking, she is determined to try. Barely able to pay the rent, Myriam secretly sleeps in...
When Lars Thorvald's wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wine--and a dashing sommelier--he's left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. He's determined to pass on his love of food to his daughter--starting with puréed pork shoulder. As Eva grows, she finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her...
| Author | Arlo Guthrie |
| ISBN | 0394176642 |
You can get anything you want there, or so went Arlo Guthrie's song, a lengthy monologue about a Thanksgiving dinner and how its aftermath kept Guthrie out of the Vietnam-era draft. Arthur Penn's movie version, which stars Guthrie, James Broderick, and Pat Quinn, has a shambling, good-natured feel,...
| Author | Howard Koch |
| ISBN | 0879513195 |
Released in December 1942, Casablanca is the classic of all classic films, the enduring triumph of Hollywood's golden age. This volume contains the complete screenplay as well as a behind-the-scenes look at how the Oscar-winning movie was made, by one of its writers, Howard Koch. Charles Champlin,...
| Author | Melissa Nathan |
| ISBN | 0060736658 |
The Appetizer
Katie has lofty career aspirations that seem to change almost hourly: writer, film director, teacher, educational psychiatrist. In the meantime, she's waiting tables and waiting for "Mr. Right" to arrive out of the blue -- which seems unlikely, considering her romantic track...
Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Cafe: Breakfast Served All Day
| Author | Mollie Katzen |
| ISBN | 0786862696 |
Breakfast is back! And Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café offers tasty, protein-rich, meatless breakfasts to boost your energy level and get you going first thing in the morning--or any time of the day. Mollie Katzen provides simple, mouth-watering, healthful recipes and menus for every day of the week,...
| Author | Tom Robbins |
| ISBN | 1842430343 |
I can't think of any other book I've read very recently that left my mind as thoroughly blown as Skinny Legs and All. I'd only read one other Tom Robbins book -- Still Life With Woodpecker -- so I was prepared for his playfulness, humor, intricate (but goofy) language, and overall trippy feel that all come...
| Author | Cynthia Rylant |
| ISBN | 0152057501 |
At the Van Gogh Cafe, anything can happen. Clara's dad owns the cafe, and she's seen it all--from food that cooks by itself to poems that foretell the future. This award-winning collection of vignettes by Newbery medalist Cynthia Rylant is a treat to be relished. So bring your appetite for the unexpected,...
| Author | Jane Stern |
| ISBN | 0767922646 |
Roadfood by Jane and Michael Stern is
a cross-country culinary guide that should be stashed in every food lover's glove compartment.--People magazine
Now in its sixth edition, Roadfood has been called a bible for motorists seeking mouth-watering barbecue or homemade pie by USA Today. This...
Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant
| Author | Carolyn B. Mitchell |
| ISBN | 0671679902 |
Since its opening in 1973, Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York, has been synonymous with creative cuisine with a healthful, vegetarian emphasis.
Each Sunday at Moosewood Restaurant, diners experience a new ethnic or regional cuisine, sometimes exotic, sometimes familiar. From...
