Food Memoirs: Home

Beginning at Per Se, one of the most recent, exclusive, and expensive of Manhattan's four-star restaurants, Ruhlman takes readers into some of America's most illustrious - and most frenetic - kitchens. Throughout his travels, he seeks out and explains new trends and phenomena, like Las Vegas's recent elevation to the country's food Gomorrah, and returns to previous haunts to see what's changed. A dispatch from a new world where chefs are stars and culinary school classes are burgeoning, The Reach of a Chef looks at the state of professional cooking in the post-Child, Food Network era via the heavy hitters in the industry such as Thomas Keller and Masa Takayama, Grant Achatz and Melissa Kelly, Emeril Lagasse and a new breed of cooking celebrity: girl next door Rachael Ray.

In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential, a revealing and entertaining insider's tour through top restaurant kitchens, told from the unique perspective of a critically acclaimed pastry chef. Spiced is Dalia Jurgensen's memoir of leaving her office job and pursuing her dream of becoming a chef.

From acclaimed novelist Kate Christensen, "Blue Plate Special "is a mouthwatering literary memoir about an unusual upbringing and the long, winding path to happiness. "To taste fully is to live fully." For Kate Christensen, food and eating have always been powerful connectors to self and world--"a subterranean conduit to sensuality, memory, desire." Her appetites run deep; in her own words, she spent much of her life as "a hungry, lonely, wild animal looking for happiness and stability." Now, having found them at last, in this passionate feast of a memoir she reflects upon her journey of innocence lost and wisdom gained, mistakes made and lessons learned, and hearts broken and mended.