Celebrity Chefs

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.

As Serious Eats's culinary nerd-in-residence, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has pondered all these questions and more. Kenji shows that often, conventional methods don't work that well, and home cooks can achieve far better results using new - but simple - techniques. In hundreds of easy-to-make recipes, you will find out how to make foolproof Hollandaise sauce in just two minutes, how to transform one simple tomato sauce into a half dozen dishes, how to make the crispiest, creamiest potato casserole ever conceived, and much more.

In his lively, unprecedented close-up portrait of Ferran Adrià, award-winning food writer Colman Andrews traces this groundbreaking chef’s rise from resort hotel dishwasher to culinary deity, and the evolution of El Bulli from a German-owned beach bar into the establishment voted annually by an international jury to be “the world’s best restaurant”.

Here is Anthony Bourdain's long-awaited sequel to Kitchen Confidential, the worldwide best seller. A lot has changed since then - for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business, and for Anthony Bourdain. Medium Raw explores these changes, moving back and forth from the author's bad old days to the present.

After the celebrity chef rises from his grave, he aims to create a zombie army of chefs who will rule the world, using human species as the main ingredient in their cordon bleu meals. Can Floyd be stopped before it’s too late, or will we all end up roasted and then drizzled in a rich chasseur sauce?

When Nigella Lawson’s first book, How to Eat, was published in 1998, two things were immediately clear: that this fresh and fiercely intelligent voice would revolutionise cookery writing and that How to Eat was an instant classic of the genre. Here was a versatile culinary bible, through which a generation discovered how to feel at home in the kitchen and found the confidence to experiment and adapt recipes to their own needs. This was a book about home cooking for busy lives.

This is Gordon Ramsay’s autobiography – the first time he has told the full story of how he became the world’s most famous and infamous chef: his difficult childhood, his brother’s heroin addiction and his failed first career as a footballer: all of these things have made him the celebrated culinary talent and media powerhouse that he is today.

In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar opened in Manhattan's East Village. Its young chef-owner, David Chang, served ramen and pork buns to a mix of fellow restaurant cooks and confused diners whose idea of ramen was instant noodles in Styrofoam cups. It would have been impossible to know that he would become one of the most influential chefs of his generation. Full of grace, candour, grit and humour, Eat a Peach chronicles Chang's journey, laying bare his mistakes and feelings of otherness and inadequacy.

Slater writes about how his cooking has changed from discovering the best way to roast a chicken to the trick to smoky, smooth aubergine mash. He gives the tales behind the recipes and recalls the first time he ate a baguette in Paris, his love of jewel-bright Japanese pickled radishes and his initial slice of buttercream-topped chocolate cake. These are the favourite recipes Nigel Slater cooks at home every day; the heart and soul of his cooking. Chapters include: a slice of tart, a chicken in the pot, everyday greens, the solace of soup and the ritual of tea.

In 2021, the world of cooking lost a legendary figure. Albert Roux, together with his brother Michel, transformed the way we eat, cook and appreciate food in this country. It is no exaggeration to say that most of what makes our current culinary landscape so vibrant began with these two brothers and their groundbreaking restaurant, Le Gavroche. Albert's memoir takes us from his childhood in wartime France, where the ever-looming presence of the German troops made it a challenge for his mother to keep the family fed, right up to the almost instant success of Le Gavroche

From the reinvention of French food through the fine dining revolution in America, Daniel Boulud has been a witness to and a creator of today's food culture. A modern improviser with a classical foundation (a little rock 'n' roll and a lot of Mozart, he'd say), he speaks with the authority that comes from a lifetime of preparing, presenting, and thinking about food - an ancient calling with universal resonance. In Letters to a Young Chef, Boulud speaks not only of how to make a career as a chef in today's world, but also of why one should want to do so in the first place.

It's a familiar trope: angry men berating each other in kitchens as pots furiously boil, sauces burn and a giant slab of beef rests in the background. The dominant view of a professional kitchen is one of chaos and pent-up fury - a gladiatorial contest of male ego. Why then do we also hear the misogynistic refrain that women 'belong in the kitchen' if, in a professional context, they're all but erased from them?

Tracing its earliest incarnations in the city of Pompeii, where Sitwell is stunned by the sophistication of the dining scene, this is a romp through history as we meet the characters and discover the events that shape the way we eat today. Sitwell, restaurant critic for The Telegraph and famous for his acerbic criticisms on the hit BBC show MasterChef, tackles this enormous subject with his typical wit and precision.

Cook, Eat, Repeat is a delicious and delightful combination of recipes intertwined with narrative essays about food, all in Nigella's engaging and insightful prose. Whether asking 'What is a Recipe?' or declaring death to the Guilty Pleasure, Nigella's wisdom about food and life comes to the fore, with tasty new recipes that listeners will want to return to again and again.

Before the heyday of the Food Network, there was Chef Tell - TV persona of Friedemann Paul Erhardt, America's first TV showman chef. Big on personality and flavor, Chef Tell was once called by Philadelphia magazine the "affably roguish Bad Boy of the Philadelphia restaurant world." Chef Tell explores how a young German American chef became America's biggest TV celebrity chef of his time. Most of Chef Tell's forty million baby boomer viewers - a number comparable to Julia Child's - never knew his fascinating, hardscrabble life story. Until now.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Mary Berry's autobiography, Recipe for Life, read by the actress Patricia Hodge. From Queen of Tarts to the nation's heart, Mary Berry shares her Recipe for Life. "In the words of my father, my birth caused no end of trouble..." From the moment she came into the world - two weeks early, throwing her parents' lives into disarray - Mary has gracefully but firmly done things her own way.

Elaine's was a world-famous New York restaurant that became home to writers and celebrities. Owner Elaine Kaufman was known to be "New York feisty", controversial, often rude, always blunt, with the flare of Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker. Elaine was highly respected and frequently feared, and Elaine's the restaurant received the public's love and praise time and time again. Woody Allen held a regular table there, and Elaine's was even featured in Allen's Manhattan and Billy Joel's song "Big Shot".

Ten Restaurants That Changed America reveals how the history of our restaurants reflects nothing less than the history of America itself. Whether charting the rise of our love affair with Chinese food through San Francisco's the Mandarin, evoking the richness of Italian food through Mamma Leone's, or chronicling French haute cuisine through Henri Soulé's Le Pavillon, Paul Freedman uses each restaurant to tell a story of race and class, immigration and assimilation.

When the CIA approaches celebrity chef Sebastian Pike about using his award-winning food and culture travel show as cover for espionage, the outspoken bad-boy host says no. They push. They'd embed their top agent in his crew to do the spy work. And when romantic sparks crackle between him and the female agent, Pike's all in, kicking off a romantic spy thriller in which the globetrotting celebrity chef uses his TV series to help sneak Putin's accountant out of Russia before he's exposed as a mole.

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.