The Alinea Project

A photographic memoir detailing the process of cooking every dish in the Alinea cookbook.

The debut cookbook from the restaurant Gourmet magazine named the best in the country. A pioneer in American cuisine, chef Grant Achatz represents the best of the molecular gastronomy movement--brilliant fundamentals and exquisite taste paired with a groundbreaking approach to new techniques and equipment. ALINEA showcases Achatz's cuisine with more than 100 dishes (totaling 600 recipes) and 600 photographs presented in a deluxe volume. Three feature pieces frame the book: Michael Ruhlman considers Alinea's role in the global dining scene, Jeffrey Steingarten offers his distinctive take on dining at the restaurant, and Mark McClusky explores the role of technology in the Alinea kitchen. Buyers of the book will receive access to a website featuring video demonstrations, interviews, and an online forum that allows readers to interact with Achatz and his team. "Achatz is something new on the national culinary landscape: a chef as ambitious as Thomas Keller who wants to make his mark not with perfection but with constant innovation . . . Get close enough to sit down and allow yourself to be teased, challenged, and coddled by Achatz's version of this kind of cooking, and you can have one of the most enjoyable culinary adventures of your life." --Corby Kummer, senior editor of Atlantic Monthly "Someone new has entered the arena. His name is Grant Achatz, and he is redefining the American restaurant once again for an entirely new generation . . . Alinea is in perpetual motion; having eaten here once, you can't wait to come back, to see what Achatz will come up with next." --GourmetReviews & AwardsJames Beard Foundation Cookbook Award Finalist: Cooking from a professional Point of View Category James Beard Foundation Outstanding Chef Award! "Even if your kitchen isn't equipped with a paint-stripping heat gun, thermocirculator, or refractometer, and you're only vaguely aware that chefs use siphons and foams in contemporary cooking, you can enjoy this daring cookbook from Grant Achatz of the Chicago restaurant Alinea.. . . While the recipes can hardly become part of your everday cooking, this book is far too interesting to be left on the coffee table. As you read, a question emerges: Is Alinea's food art? . . . I go a little further, describing Achatz with a word that he would probably never use to describe himself: avant-garde, as it defined art movements at the beginning of the last century--planned, self-concious, and structured attempts to provoke and shake the status quo. Just as with those artists, the results are not necessarily as interesting as the intentions and concepts behind them. In this sense, this volume constitutes a full-blown although not threatening manifesto."—Art of Eating

An award-winning chef describes how he lost his sense of taste to cancer, a setback that prompted him to discover alternate cooking methods and create his celebrated progressive cuisine.

A soulful chef creates his first masterpiece What Mourad Lahlou has developed over the last decade and a half at his Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant is nothing less than a new, modern Moroccan cuisine, inspired by memories, steeped in colorful stories, and informed by the tireless exploration of his curious mind. His book is anything but a dutifully “authentic” documentation of Moroccan home cooking. Yes, the great classics are all here—the basteeya, the couscous, the preserved lemons, and much more. But Mourad adapts them in stunningly creative ways that take a Moroccan idea to a whole new place. The 100-plus recipes, lavishly illustrated with food and location photography, and terrifically engaging text offer a rare blend of heat, heart, and palate.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From one half of the cult comedy duo Tim & Eric comes the culinary bible for modern food freaks, showing you how to throw epic parties, suck the marrow out of life, and cook better than your grandmother. ONE OF THE TEN BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker • ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: New York Post • “A book with all the recipes to Wareheim’s insanely delicious secret sauces? And a sneak peek at the man behind the curtain?? I’ll take two please . . . extra crispy!!!”—Jack Black Director and actor Eric Wareheim might be known for his comedy, but his passion for food and drink is no joke. For the last fifteen years he has been traveling the world in search of the best bites and sips, learning from top chefs and wine professionals along the way. His devotion to beautiful natural wine, the freshest seafood crudos, and perfectly cooked rib-eyes is legit. And now he wants to share with you everything he’s learned on this epic food journey. In Foodheim, Wareheim takes readers deep into his foodscape with chapters on topics like circle foods (burgers, tacos), grandma foods (pasta, meatballs), and juicy foods (steak, ribs). Alongside recipes for Chicken Parm with Nonna Sauce, Personal Pan Pep Pep, and Crudite Extreme with Dill Dippers, you will discover which eight cocktail recipes you should know by heart, how to saber a bottle of bubbly, and what you need to do to achieve handmade pasta perfection at home. Written with award-winning cookbook editor Emily Timberlake and featuring eye-popping photographs and art chronicling Wareheim's evolution as a drinker, how to baby your pizza dough into pie perfection, and more, Foodheim is the ultimate book for anyone who lives to eat. Praise for Foodheim “We are all searching for greatness, and Eric is what we are searching for in ourselves. Through his searching we don’t need to search: we have found. Eric is my Martha Stewart, my mother. He’s the maître d, the Emeril Lagasse, the Andre Agassi, the Dennis Rodman. He’s true love and commitment to the craft of the food. He is food.”—Matty Matheson “Eric has written an instant classic that will command prime real estate in every young culinary enthusiast’s kitchen. People will say about Foodheim what past generations have said about Joy of Cooking, ’This book taught me how to cook.’ If this book existed as a resource for me when I was making my bones, I would surely be more successful today. Hail, Foodheim!”—Kris Yenbamroong, chef and owner of NIGHT + MARKET

The Chicago Food Encyclopedia is a far-ranging portrait of an American culinary paradise. Hundreds of entries deliver all of the visionary restauranteurs, Michelin superstars, beloved haunts, and food companies of today and yesterday. More than 100 sumptuous images include thirty full-color photographs that transport readers to dining rooms and food stands across the city. Throughout, a roster of writers, scholars, and industry experts pays tribute to an expansive--and still expanding--food history that not only helped build Chicago but fed a growing nation. Pizza. Alinea. Wrigley Spearmint. Soul food. Rick Bayless. Hot Dogs. Koreatown. Everest. All served up A-Z, and all part of the ultimate reference on Chicago and its food.

DIVIACP Award Winner 2019 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the acclaimed French Laundry restaurant in the Napa Valley—“the most exciting place to eat in the United States” (The New York Times). The most transformative cookbook of the century celebrates this milestone by showcasing the genius of chef/proprietor Thomas Keller himself. Keller is a wizard, a purist, a man obsessed with getting it right. And this, his first cookbook, is every bit as satisfying as a French Laundry meal itself: a series of small, impeccable, highly refined, intensely focused courses. Most dazzling is how simple Keller's methods are: squeegeeing the moisture from the skin on fish so it sautées beautifully; poaching eggs in a deep pot of water for perfect shape; the initial steeping in the shell that makes cooking raw lobster out of the shell a cinch; using vinegar as a flavor enhancer; the repeated washing of bones for stock for the cleanest, clearest tastes. From innovative soup techniques, to the proper way to cook green vegetables, to secrets of great fish cookery, to the creation of breathtaking desserts; from beurre monté to foie gras au torchon, to a wild and thoroughly unexpected take on coffee and doughnuts, The French Laundry Cookbook captures, through recipes, essays, profiles, and extraordinary photography, one of America's great restaurants, its great chef, and the food that makes both unique. One hundred and fifty superlative recipes are exact recipes from the French Laundry kitchen—no shortcuts have been taken, no critical steps ignored, all have been thoroughly tested in home kitchens. If you can't get to the French Laundry, you can now re-create at home the very experience Wine Spectator described as “as close to dining perfection as it gets.”