front cover of American Tacos
American Tacos
A History and Guide
José R. Ralat
University of Texas Press, 2024

The first history of tacos developed in the United States, now revised and expanded, this book is the definitive survey that American taco lovers must have for their own taco explorations.

“Everything a food history book should be: illuminating, well-written, crusading, and inspiring a taco run afterwards. You’ll gain five pounds reading it, but don’t worry—most of that will go to your brain.”—Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times

“[Ralat] gives an in-depth look at each taco’s history and showcases other aspects of taco culture that has solidified it as a go-to dish on dinner tables throughout the nation.”—Smithsonian Magazine

“A fascinating look at America’s many regional tacos. . . . From California’s locavore tacos to Korean ‘K-Mex’ tacos to Jewish ‘deli-Mex’ to Southern-drawl ‘Sur-Mex’ tacos to American-Indian-inspired fry bread tacos to chef-driven ‘moderno’ tacos, Ralat lays out a captivating landscape.”—Houston Chronicle

“You’ll learn an enormous and entertaining amount about [tacos] in . . . American Tacos. . . . The book literally covers the map of American tacos, from Texas and the South to New York, Chicago, Kansas City and California.”—Forbes

“An impressively reported new book . . . a fast-paced cultural survey and travel guide . . . American Tacos is an exceptional book.”—Taste

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American Tacos
A History and Guide
By José R. Ralat
University of Texas Press, 2020

2021 Best Travel Book, International Latino Book Awards

Tacos may have been created south of the border, but Americans have made this Mexican food their own, with each style reflective of a time and a place. American Tacos explores them all, taking us on a detailed and delicious journey through the evolution of this dish.

In search of every taco variety from California to Texas and beyond, Ralat traveled from coast to coast and border to border, visiting thirty-eight cities across the country. He examines the pervasive crunchy taco and the new Alta California tacos from chefs Wes Avila, Christine Rivera, and Carlos Salgado. He tastes famous Tex-Mex tacos like the puffy taco and breakfast taco, then tracks down the fry bread taco and the kosher taco. And he searches for the regional hybrid tacos of the American South and the modern, chef-driven tacos of restaurants everywhere. Throughout, he tells the story of how each style of taco came to be, creating a rich look at the diverse taco landscape north of the border. Featuring interviews with taqueros and details on taco paraphernalia and the trappings of taco culture, American Tacos is a book no taco fan will want to take a bite without.

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Cafe Indiana
A Guide to Indiana’s Down-Home Cafes
Joanne Raetz Stuttgen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Cafe Indiana is both a guide to Indiana’s hometown mom-and-pop restaurants and a reclamation and celebration of small-town Midwest culture. The hungry diner looking for adventure and authenticity can use Cafe Indiana simply as a guide to the state’s quintessential eats: the best fiddlers, macaroni and cheese, soup beans, and beef Manhattan. But Stuttgen also captures the spirit of the locals, bringing to life the people whose stories give the book—and the food—its soul.
     Over plates of chicken and noodles, fried bologna sandwiches, and sugar cream pie, folks are crafting community at the Main Street eatery. In Cafe Indiana, Hoosiers and out-of-staters alike are invited to pull out a chair and sit a spell.
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Cafe Indiana Cookbook
Joanne Raetz Stuttgen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

Joanne Raetz Stuttgen’s cafe guides showcase popular regional diner traditions. In her companion book Cafe Indiana she introduces travelers to the state’s top mom-and-pop restaurants. Now, Cafe Indiana Cookbook allows you to whip up local cafe classics yourself. Breakfast dishes range from Swiss Mennonite eier datch (egg pancakes) to biscuits and gravy; entree highlights include chicken with noodles (or with dumplings) and the iconic Hoosier breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. For dessert, try such Indiana favorites as apple dapple cake or rhubarb, coconut cream, or sugar cream pie . All 130 recipes have been kitchen-tested by Jolene Ketzenberger, food writer for the Indianapolis Star.
    Cafe Indiana Cookbook reveals the favorite recipes of Indiana’s Main Street eateries, including some rescued for publication before a diner’s sad closure, and documents old-fashioned delicacies now fading from the culinary landscape—like southern Indiana’s fried brain sandwiches.

Finalist, Cookbook, Midwest Book Awards
 

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Cafe Wisconsin
A Guide To Wisconsin's Down-Home Cafes
Joanne Raetz Stuttgen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
    Cafe Wisconsin returns in a new, updated version that provides a sure-bet guide to Wisconsin’s best small town, home-cooking cafes. For this second edition, author Joanne Raetz Stuttgen traveled more than 12,000 miles in six months, revisiting old business districts and main streets in search of the ultimate cafe, the perfect slice of homemade pie, and the meaning of life in Wisconsin’s down-home cafes.
    Featuring 133 cafes, with another 101 Next Best Bets alternatives, Cafe Wisconsin is every hungry traveler’s guide to real mashed potatoes, melt-in-your-mouth hot beef, from-scratch baked goods, and colorful coffee klatches. At the counter of aptly named cafes like the Coffee Cup, Main Street, and Chatterbox, you’ll laugh with owners, shake dice with customers, and find the authentic taste and flavor of Wisconsin.
    Come on. Let’s go out to eat!
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Cafe Wisconsin Cookbook
Joanne Raetz Stuttgen and Terese Allen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
     Joanne Stuttgen's popular book Cafe Wisconsin guides travelers to Wisconsin's best home-style cafes. Now, continue the journey with the Cafe Wisconsin Cookbook, a compilation of more than one hundred cherished recipes that showcase the distinct culinary and cultural traditions of Wisconsin. From classic pot roasts and country-style pies to long-simmering soups and heritage specialties, the whole soul-satisfying spectrum of Wisconsin cafe fare is here. 
     Stuttgen tracked down Wisconsin's best small town cafes, from Boscobel to Sturgeon Bay, chatted with owners and customers, took notes, and recorded the history, anecdotes, and recipes behind the food. Tested and fine-tuned by Wisconsin food writer and former chef Terese Allen, these favorite recipes will bring an authentic slice of Wisconsin into your home kitchen.
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Cheffes de Cuisine
Women and Work in the Professional French Kitchen
Rachel E. Black
University of Illinois Press, 2021

Works of Distinction, LDEI M.F.K. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Culinary Media Content, 2022

A rare woman’s-eye-view of working in the professional French kitchen

Though women enter France’s culinary professions at higher rates than ever, men still receive the lion’s share of the major awards and Michelin stars. Rachel E. Black looks at the experiences of women in Lyon to examine issues of gender inequality in France’s culinary industry. Known for its female-led kitchens, Lyon provides a unique setting for understanding the gender divide, as Lyonnais women have played a major role in maintaining the city’s culinary heritage and its status as a center for innovation. Voices from history combine with present-day interviews and participant observation to reveal the strategies women use to navigate male-dominated workplaces or, in many cases, avoid men in kitchens altogether. Black also charts how constraints imposed by French culture minimize the impact of #MeToo and other reform-minded movements. 

Evocative and original, Cheffes de Cuisine celebrates the successes of women inside the professional French kitchen and reveals the obstacles women face in the culinary industry and other male-dominated professions.

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The Culinarians
Lives and Careers from the First Age of American Fine Dining
David S. Shields
University of Chicago Press, 2017
He presided over Virginia’s great political barbeques for the last half of the nineteenth century, taught the young Prince of Wales to crave mint juleps in 1859, catered to Virginia’s mountain spas, and fed two generations of Richmond epicures with terrapin and turkey.
 
This fascinating culinarian is John Dabney (1821–1900), who was born a slave, but later built an enterprising catering business. Dabney is just one of 175 influential cooks and restaurateurs profiled by David S. Shields in The Culinarians, a beautifully produced encyclopedic history of the rise of professional cooking in America from the early republic to Prohibition.
 
Shields’s concise biographies include the legendary Julien, founder in 1793 of America’s first restaurant, Boston’s Restorator; and Louis Diat and Oscar of the Waldorf, the men most responsible for keeping the ideal of fine dining alive between the World Wars. Though many of the gastronomic pioneers gathered here are less well known, their diverse influence on American dining should not be overlooked—plus, their stories are truly entertaining. We meet an African American oyster dealer who became the Congressional caterer, and, thus, a powerful broker of political patronage; a French chef who was a culinary savant of vegetables and drove the rise of California cuisine in the 1870s; and a rotund Philadelphia confectioner who prevailed in a culinary contest with a rival in New York by staging what many believed to be the greatest American meal of the nineteenth century. He later grew wealthy selling ice cream to the masses. Shields also introduces us to a French chef who brought haute cuisine to wealthy prospectors and a black restaurateur who hosted a reconciliation dinner for black and white citizens at the close of the Civil War in Charleston.
 
Altogether, Culinarians is a delightful compendium of charcuterie-makers, pastry-pipers, caterers, railroad chefs, and cooking school matrons—not to mention drunks, temperance converts, and gangsters—who all had a hand in creating the first age of American fine dining and its legacy of conviviality and innovation that continues today.
 
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Dining Out
A Global History of Restaurants
Katie Rawson and Elliott Shore
Reaktion Books, 2019
A global history of restaurants beyond white tablecloths and maître d’s, Dining Out presents restaurants both as businesses and as venues for a range of human experiences. From banquets in twelfth-century China to the medicinal roots of French restaurants, the origins of restaurants are not singular—nor is the history this book tells. Katie Rawson and Elliott Shore highlight stories across time and place, including how chifa restaurants emerged from the migration of Chinese workers and their marriage to Peruvian businesswomen in nineteenth-century Peru; how Alexander Soyer transformed kitchen chemistry by popularizing the gas stove, pre-dating the pyrotechnics of molecular gastronomy by a century; and how Harvey Girls dispelled the ill repute of waiting tables, making rich lives for themselves across the American West. From restaurant architecture to technological developments, staffing and organization, tipping and waiting table, ethnic cuisines, and slow and fast foods, this delectably illustrated and profoundly informed and entertaining history takes us from the world’s first restaurants in Kaifeng, China, to the latest high-end dining experiences.
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Dining Out in Boston
A Culinary History
James C. O'Connell
University Press of New England, 2016
Over the years, Boston has been one of America’s leading laboratories of urban culture, including restaurants, and Boston history provides valuable insights into American food ways. James C. O’Connell, in this fascinating look at more than two centuries of culinary trends in Boston restaurants, presents a rich and hitherto unexplored side to the city’s past. Dining Out in Boston shows that the city was a pioneer in elaborate hotel dining, oyster houses, French cuisine, student hangouts, ice cream parlors, the twentieth-century revival of traditional New England dishes, and contemporary locavore and trendy foodie culture. In these stories of the most-beloved Boston restaurants of yesterday and today—illustrated with an extensive collection of historic menus, postcards, and photos—O’Connell reveals a unique history sure to whet the intellectual and nostalgic appetite of Bostonians and restaurant-goers the world over.
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Dishing It Out
In Search of the Restaurant Experience
Robert Appelbaum
Reaktion Books, 2011
 
From the hamburger haven to the temple of gastronomy, the restaurant is a fixture of modern life. But why is that so? What needs has the restaurant come to satisfy, and what needs has it come to impose upon the experience of the modern world? In Dishing It Out, Robert Appelbaum travels around America and Europe and through the annals of literature and history to explore the social meaning of the restaurant—and to discover what we ought to be asking of the restaurant experience today.
 
Since its founding in pre-Revolutionary France, the restaurant has always inspired contradictory feelings and served contradictory purposes. It has stood for a kind of liberation: the embrace of pleasure and sociability for their own sake. But it has also encouraged narcissistic consumerism at the cost of the exploitation of restaurant workers, and the self-deception of restaurant-goers. Drawing on the work of such writers as Grimod de la Reynière, Jean-Paul Sartre, Isak Dinesen and M.F.K. Fisher, and sampling fare from macaroni cheese in workaday London to oysters and sausages in seaside France, Appelbaum argues that though restaurants are inherently problematic as social institutions, they are characteristic of who and what we are. They are expressions of what we need as human beings. And for that reason, though they contribute to inequality they can also be used to promote the interests of cultural democracy.
 
A unique rethinking of the restaurant experience, at once entertaining and learned, Dishing it Out is an important contribution to our knowledge of food, literature, history and society.

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Great Dishes from New Jersey's Favorite Restaurants
Caparulo, Vicki J.
Rutgers University Press, 2003
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Imitation of Life
Fannie Hurst
Duke University Press, 2004
A bestseller in 1933, and subsequently adapted into two beloved and controversial films, Imitation of Life has played a vital role in ongoing conversations about race, femininity, and the American Dream. Bea Pullman, a white single mother, and her African American maid, Delilah Johnston, also a single mother, rear their daughters together and become business partners. Combining Bea’s business savvy with Delilah’s irresistible southern recipes, they build an Aunt Jemima-like waffle business and an international restaurant empire. Yet their public success brings them little happiness. Bea is torn between her responsibilities as a businesswoman and those of a mother; Delilah is devastated when her light-skinned daughter, Peola, moves away to pass as white. Imitation of Life struck a chord in the 1930s, and it continues to resonate powerfully today.

The author of numerous bestselling novels, a masterful short story writer, and an outspoken social activist, Fannie Hurst was a major celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century. Daniel Itzkovitz’s introduction situates Imitation of Life in its literary, biographical, and cultural contexts, addressing such topics as the debates over the novel and films, the role of Hurst’s one-time secretary and great friend Zora Neale Hurston in the novel’s development, and the response to the novel by Hurst’s friend Langston Hughes, whose one-act satire, “Limitations of Life” (which reverses the races of Bea and Delilah), played to a raucous Harlem crowd in the late 1930s. This edition brings a classic of popular American literature back into print.

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The Invention of the Restaurant
Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, With a New Preface
Rebecca L. Spang
Harvard University Press, 2019

Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize
Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize


“Witty and full of fascinating details.”
Los Angeles Times


Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today.

This is a book about the French revolution in taste—about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing the social life of the world in the process. We see how over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic state to transform restaurants yet again, this time conferring star status upon oysters and champagne.

“An ambitious, thought-changing book…Rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories.”
—Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

“[A] pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant.”
New York Times

“A lively, engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it developed…Spang is…as generous in her helpings of historical detail as any glutton could wish.”
The Times

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Local Flavor
Restaurants That Shaped Chicago’s Neighborhoods
Jean Iversen
Northwestern University Press, 2018

The neighborhoods that make up Chicago’s rich cultural landscape have been defined by the restaurants that anchor them. In Local Flavor, the popular food writer Jean Iversen chronicles eight beloved local eateries, from Chinatown on the South Side to Rogers Park in the far North, tracing the story of how they became neighborhood institutions.

Iversen has meticulously gathered the tales, recipes, and cultural traditions that define Chicago’s culinary past and present. Rich with firsthand accounts from local restaurateurs, their families, long-time customers, and staff, Local Flavor is a community-driven look at Chicago through a gastronomical lens.

Including recipes for popular dishes from each restaurant that readers can try at home, Local Flavor weaves together ethnography, family, and food history into a story that will enthrall both food and Chicago history lovers.

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Love Is My Favorite Flavor
A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All
Wini Moranville
University of Iowa Press, 2024
In a remarkable career that has spanned nearly fifty years, Wini Moranville has witnessed the American restaurant landscape transform from the inside out. At just shy of fourteen, she began a ten-year stretch working in a kaleidoscope of quintessential midwestern eateries of the time. Moranville’s hands-on experiences weave a vivid tapestry of the American restaurant landscape in the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1990s, the tables turned as Moranville became a prolific food and wine writer for national publications, as well as the dining critic for the Des Moines Register and dsm Magazine.
Amidst the vast changes that have occurred over the years, Love Is My Favorite Flavor underscores the timelessness of what it is we seek when we entrust restaurateurs with our hard-earned money and our hard-won leisure time. Dining out may have changed dramatically since the 1970s, but the joys of being in the hands of people who care deeply about our time at their tables have not.
 
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Made in Chicago
Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites
Monica Eng and David Hammond
University of Illinois Press, 2023

A BookRiot Most Anticipated Travel Book of 2023

Italian beef and hot dogs get the headlines. Cutting-edge cuisine and big-name chefs get the Michelin stars. But Chicago food shows its true depth in classic dishes conceived in the kitchens of immigrant innovators, neighborhood entrepreneurs, and mom-and-pop visionaries.

Monica Eng and David Hammond draw on decades of exploring the city’s food landscape to serve up thirty can’t-miss eats found in all corners of Chicago. From Mild Sauce to the Jibarito and from Taffy Grapes to Steak and Lemonade, Eng and Hammond present stories of the people and places behind each dish while illuminating how these local favorites reflect the multifaceted history of the city and the people who live there. Each entry provides all the information you need to track down whatever sounds good and selected recipes even let you prepare your own Flaming Saganaki or Akutagawa.

Generously illustrated with full-color photos, Made in Chicago provides locals and visitors alike with loving profiles of a great food city’s defining dishes.

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Madison Chefs
Stories of Food, Farms, and People
Lindsay Christians and Chris Hynes
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Why do Salvatore’s tomato pies have the sauce on the top? Where did chef Tami Lax learn to identify mushrooms in the woods? How did Morris develop its signature ramen?
 
Farm-to-table is a cliché, but its roots among the farmers and chefs of south-central Wisconsin are deep, vibrant, and resilient. From brats and burgers to bibimbap, Madison’s food scene looks substantially different than it did just a decade ago. Though the city has always been ahead of the locavore movement, a restaurant boom in the 2010s radically changed the dining landscape. Even when individual eateries close or chefs move on, their ideas, connections, and creativity have lasting power. Much larger cities have been unable to match the culinary variety, innovation, and depth of talent found in Wisconsin’s state capital.
 
Lindsay Christians’s in-depth look at nine creative, intense, and dedicated chefs captures the reason why Madison’s food culture remains a gem in America’s Upper Midwest. This beautifully illustrated book will leave you salivating—or making reservations.
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Michigan's Town and Country Inns, 5th Edition
Susan Newhof
University of Michigan Press, 2013

The fifth edition of Michigan’s Town & Country Inns is a guide to more than 50 inns, bed-and-breakfast homes, and historic lodgings in the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan.

Choose from lighthouses anchored to the rugged shores of Lake Superior, Victorian mansions built by lumber and mining barons, rustic log lodges, and romantic small town hideaways. Meet the innkeepers themselves, who range from retired military officers and corporate heads to artists and poets. You’ll find detailed descriptions of the accommodations along with information about rates, suitability for children, and policies on smoking and pets. Get a sense of the flavor and mood of each and learn about fun things to do in the surrounding areas. Numerous photos enhance the descriptions and provide a visitor’s-eye view of some of the most unusual and delightful places to stay in Michigan.

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Never Trust a Thin Cook and Other Lessons from Italy’s Culinary Capital
Eric Dregni
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

The food-obsessed chronicle of an American’s three years in Italy—now available in paperback

 

I simply want to live in the place with the best food in the world. This dream led Eric Dregni to Italy, first to Milan and eventually to a small, fog-covered town to the north: Modena, the birthplace of balsamic vinegar, Ferrari, and Luciano Pavarotti. Never Trust a Thin Cook is a classic American abroad tale, brimming with adventures both expected and unexpected, awkward social moments, and most important, very good food.

 

Parmesan thieves. Tortellini based on the shape of Venus’s navel. Infiltrating the secret world of the balsamic vinegar elite. Life in Modena is a long way from the Leaning Tower of Pizza (the south Minneapolis pizzeria where Eric and his girlfriend and fellow traveler Katy first met), and while some Italians are impressed that “Minnesota” sounds like “minestrone,” they are soon learning what it means to live in a country where the word “safe” doesn’t actually exist—only “less dangerous.” Thankfully, another meal is always waiting, and Dregni revels in uncorking the secrets of Italian cuisine, such as how to guzzle espresso “corrected” with grappa and learning that mold really does make a good salami great.

 

What begins as a gastronomical quest soon becomes a revealing, authentic portrait of how Italians live and a hilarious demonstration of how American and Italian cultures differ. In Never Trust a Thin Cook, Eric Dregni dishes up the sometimes wild experiences of living abroad alongside the simple pleasures of Italian culture in perfect, complementary portions.

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Phila Magazine'S Ultimate Restaurant Gde
Restaurant Guide
April White
Temple University Press, 2004
When renowned national food critic John Mariani ranked Philadelphia's food scene among the top ten in the country, placing it alongside longtime culinary destinations New York and San Francisco, nobody at PhiladelphiaMagazine was surprised. That's what the magazine's food critics—always in search of the best of Philly—have known for years. Now, the PhiladelphiaMagazine's Ultimate Restaurant Guide condenses their comprehensive knowledge—and thousands of meals—into one informative, easy-to-digest handbook, essential for both the Philadelphia foodie and the hungry tourist.

What's on the menu:
 * Profiles of Philadelphia's most influential chefs and restaurant owners, including Le Bec-Fin's Georges Perrier, and restaurant mogul Stephen Starr.
* A behind-the-scenes look at the Philadelphia food purveyors, who are responsible for some of the nation's hottest food trends—from La Colombe coffee to Metropolitan Bakery's artisanal breads to Jubilee Chocolates.
* Reviews of more than 230 of the best restaurants in the Philadelphia region, from Center City mainstays Susanna Foo and Morimoto to suburban destinations Alison at Blue Bell and Carmine's Café.
* Easy-to-use index of restaurants by cuisine and neighborhood.
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Pizza City
The Ultimate Guide to New York's Favorite Food
Genovese, Peter
Rutgers University Press, 2013
Pizza is a $35 billion a year business, and nowhere is it taken more seriously than New York City. Journalist Peter Genovese surveys the city’s pizza scene—the food, the business, the culture—by profiling pizza landmarks and personalities and rating pizzerias in all five boroughs.

In this funny, fascinating book, Genovese explores the bloggers who write about New York pizza, the obsessive city dwellers who collect and analyze the delivery boxes, Mark Bello’s school where students spend a day making pies from scratch, and Scott Wiener’s pizza bus tours.

Along the way, readers learn the history of legendary Totonno’s on Coney Island (Zagat’s number-one pizzeria for 2012), along with behind-the-scenes stories about John’s on Bleecker Street, Joe’s on Carmine, Lombardi’s, Paulie Gee’s, Motorino, and more than a dozen other favorite spots and their owners. Throughout these profiles, Genovese presents a brief history of how pizza came to the city in 1905 and developed into a major attraction in Little Italy, a neighborhood that became a training ground for many of the city’s best-loved pizzerias. Enjoyable facts and figures abound. Did you know that Americans put 250 million pounds of pepperoni on their pies every year? Or that Domino’s has more outlets per capita in Iceland than in any other country?

Beyond the stories and tidbits, Genovese provides detailed, borough-by-borough reviews of 250 pizzerias, from simple “slice shops” with scant atmosphere to gourmet pizzerias, including shops that use organic ingredients and experiment with new variations of crusts and toppings. Complemented by hundreds of current and never-before-seen archival photos, the book gives the humble slice its proper due and will leave readers overwhelmed by a sudden desire for New York pizza.
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Project 258
Making Dinner at Fish & Game
By Zakary Pelaccio and Peter Barrett
University of Texas Press, 2017

Fish & Game restaurant in Hudson, New York, is a leader in the local foods movement. Its core approach—engaging intimately with nature both wild and domestic, building relationships with farmers, and exploring the joys of fermentation—is one of interest to anyone, anywhere, who yearns to cook and eat better food. Established in 2013, Fish & Game, with its chef/owner Zakary Pelaccio and his co-chefs and partners Kevin Pomplun and Jori Jayne Emde, is already receiving national accolades and honors, including the 2016 James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northeast; 2015 James Beard Award finalist for Outstanding Restaurant Design; 2015 & 2016 Wine Enthusiast: America’s 100 Best Wine Restaurants; and 2014 James Beard Award semifinalist for Best New Restaurant.

Project 258: Making Dinner at Fish & Game presents an enticing selection of seasonal recipes, profiles of key producers who supply the restaurant, and a fascinating, beautifully illustrated look at the processes—both intellectual and culinary—behind the food at Fish & Game. Taking no shortcuts, Pelaccio and his staff handcraft many staple ingredients, including fish sauce, vinegars, maple syrup, and prosciutto. He explains how the methods and techniques practiced at Fish & Game can be applied to the food that grows wherever you live. If you ever wonder “what does this place taste like?,” let Project 258 be your guide and inspiration for locally based food sourcing and eating.

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Smart Casual
The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America
Alison Pearlman
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Fine dining and the accolades of Michelin stars once meant chandeliers, white tablecloths, and suited waiters with elegant accents. The stuffy attitude and often scant portions were the punchlines of sitcom jokes—it was unthinkable that a gourmet chef would stoop to plate a burger or a taco in his kitchen. And yet today many of us will queue up for a seat at a loud, crowded noodle bar or eagerly seek out that farm-to-table restaurant where not only the burgers and fries are  organic but the ketchup is homemade—but it’s not just us: the critics will be there too, ready to award distinction. Haute has blurred with homey cuisine in the last few decades, but how did this radical change happen, and what does it say about current attitudes toward taste? Here with the answers is food writer Alison Pearlman. In Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America, Pearlman investigates what she identifies as the increasing informality in the design of contemporary American restaurants.
 
By design, Pearlman does not just mean architecture. Her argument is more expansive—she is as interested in the style and presentation of food, the business plan, and the marketing of chefs as she is in the restaurant’s floor plan or menu design. Pearlman takes us hungrily inside the kitchens and dining rooms of restaurants coast to coast—from David Chang’s Momofuku noodle bar in New York to the seasonal, French-inspired cuisine of Alice Waters and Thomas Keller in California to the deconstructed comfort food of Homaro Cantu’s Moto in Chicago—to explore the different forms and flavors this casualization is taking. Smart Casual examines the assumed correlation between taste and social status, and argues that recent upsets to these distinctions have given rise to a new idea of sophistication, one that champions the omnivorous. The boundaries between high and low have been made flexible due to our desire to eat everything, try everything, and do so in a convivial setting.
 
Through lively on-the-scene observation and interviews with major players and chefs, Smart Casual will transport readers to restaurants around the country to learn the secrets to their success and popularity. It is certain to give foodies and restaurant-goers something delectable to chew on.
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Smothered and Covered
Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary
Ty Matejowsky
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A critical meditation of the iconic 24-7 roadside chain and its place in the southern imaginary
 
Waffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant’s consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways shaping the sociopolitical contours of today’s Bible Belt. Whether approached as a comedic punchline on the Internet, television, and other popular media or elevated as a genuine touchstone of messy American modernity, Waffle House, its employees, and everyday clientele do much to transcend such one-dimensional characterizations, earning distinction in ways that regularly go unsung.

Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary is the first book to socioculturally assess the chain within the field of contemporary food studies. In this groundbreaking work, Ty Matejowsky argues that Waffle House’s often beleaguered public persona is informed by various complexities and contradictions. Critically unpacking the iconic eatery from a less reductive perspective offers readers a more realistic and nuanced portrait of Waffle House, shedding light on how it both reflects and influences a prevailing southern imaginary—an amorphous and sometimes conflicting collection of images, ideas, attitudes, practices, linguistic accents, histories, and fantasies that frames understandings about a vibrant if also paradoxical geographic region.

Matejowsky discusses Waffle House’s roots in established southern foodways and traces the chain’s development from a lunch-counter restaurant that emerged across the South. He also considers Waffle House’s place in American and southern popular culture, highlighting its myriad depictions in music, television, film, fiction, stand-up comedy, and sports. Altogether, Matejowsky deftly and persuasively demonstrates how Waffle House serves as a microcosm of today’s South with all the accolades and criticisms this distinction entails.
 
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Steppin' Out
New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture
Lewis A. Erenberg
University of Chicago Press, 1984
The evolution of New York nightlife from the Gay Nineties through the Jazz Age was, as Lewis A. Erenberg shows, both symbol and catalyst of America's transition out of the Victorian period. Cabaret culture led the way to new styles of behavior and consumption, dissolving conventional barriers between classes, races, the sexes—even between life and art. A fabulous era of chorus girls, jazz players, lobster palaces, and hip flasks—the age of Sophie Tucker, Irene and Vernon Castle, and Gilda Gray—tangos through the pages of this ground-breaking, as well as entertaining, cultural history.
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The Tacos of Texas
By Mando Rayo and Jarod Neece
University of Texas Press, 2016

Rooted in tradición mexicana and infused with Texas food culture, tacos are some of Texans’ all-time favorite foods. In The Tacos of Texas, the taco journalists Mando Rayo and Jarod Neece take us on a muy sabroso taco tour around the state as they discover the traditions, recipes, stories, and personalities behind puffy tacos in San Antonio, trompo tacos in Dallas, breakfast tacos in Austin, carnitas tacos in El Paso, fish tacos in Corpus Christi, barbacoa in the Rio Grande Valley, and much more.

Starting with the basics—tortillas, fillings, and salsas—and how to make, order, and eat tacos, the authors highlight ten taco cities/regions of Texas. For each place, they describe what makes the tacos distinctive, name their top five places to eat, and listen to the locals tell their taco stories. They hear from restaurant owners, taqueros, abuelitas, chefs, and patrons—both well-known and everyday folks—who talk about their local taco history and culture while sharing authentic recipes and recommendations for the best taco purveyors.

Whether you can’t imagine a day without tacos or you’re just learning your way around the trailers, trucks, and taqueros that make tacos happen, The Tacos of Texas is the indispensable guidebook, cookbook, and testimonio.

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Texas BBQ
Photographs by Wyatt McSpadden
By Wyatt McSpadden
University of Texas Press, 2009

To Texans, barbecue is elemental. Succulent, savory, perfumed with smoke and spice, it transcends the term "comfort food." It's downright heavenly, and it's also a staff of Texas life. Like a dust storm or a downpour, barbecue is a force of Texas nature, a stalwart tie to the state's cultural and culinary history. Though the word is often shortened to "BBQ," the tradition of barbecue stands Texas-tall.

Photographer Wyatt McSpadden has spent some twenty years documenting barbecue—specifically, the authentic family-owned cafes that are small-town mainstays. Traveling tens of thousands of miles, McSpadden has crisscrossed the state to visit scores of barbecue purveyors, from fabled sites like Kreuz's in Lockhart to remote spots like the Lazy H Smokehouse in Kirbyville. Color or black-and-white, wide angle or close up, his pictures convey the tradition and charm of barbecue. They allow the viewer to experience each place through all five senses. The shots of cooking meat and spiraling smoke make taste and smell almost tangible. McSpadden also captures the shabby appeal of the joints themselves, from huge, concrete-floored dining halls to tiny, un-air-conditioned shacks. Most of all, McSpadden conveys the primal physicality of barbecue—the heat of fire, the heft of meat, the slickness of juices—and also records ubiquitous touches such as ancient scarred carving blocks, torn screen doors and peeling linoleum, and toothpicks in a recycled pepper sauce jar.

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front cover of Tucson's Mexican Restaurants
Tucson's Mexican Restaurants
Repasts, Recipes, and Remembrances
Suzanne Myal
University of Arizona Press, 1999
Tucson prides itself on being the Mexican Food Capital of America—and it's no wonder, with more than 150 restaurants to choose from. This book is a celebration of that culinary tradition, providing readers with not only a guide to outstanding eateries but also an intimate look at the heritage they represent.

From the traditional restaurants of South Tucson to newer dining spots on the north and east sides, Tucson's Mexican Restaurants is an affectionate look at some of the best places to savor this wonderful cuisine. Suzanne Myal takes readers into the kitchens of many of these establishments to offer insights into the families that run them, the secrets of food preparation, and even the history of some of Tucson's best-loved recipes. Many of those recipes, along with others from prominent Mexican American families, are reproduced in the book, inviting readers to try their hand at red beef tamales, chiles rellenos, and other favorite dishes.

The book is organized by six sections of town, with a locator map for each. The entry for each establishment includes address, hours, price range, and credit card information, and indicates the specialties of the house. Each entry is also coded for features such as level of alcohol service; availability of carryout, delivery, and catering; and whether the menu features heart-healthy or vegetarian options. A separate section lists Mexican bakeries and tortilla factories, and a guide to fiestas helps readers choose beer or tequila—and find menudo when they've overindulged.

From street trucks to historic sites, Mexican restaurants in Tucson offer something for every palate. This book can help visitors and residents alike find their way around them and better enjoy some of the best Mexican food north of the border.
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front cover of Wisconsin Cocktails
Wisconsin Cocktails
Jeanette Hurt
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Cocktails have always had a stronghold in America’s Dairyland. This highly illustrated volume uncovers the true stories behind the state’s obsession with brandy, ice cream drinks, and a smorgasbord of garnishes.

Beyond delving into mythic origins of several classic creations, Jeanette Hurt introduces a new generation of cocktails that offer a spin on standard concoctions. She explores the state’s unique farm-to-table ethos influenced by an abundance of locally sourced ingredients. Also included are a wealth of interviews with notable mixologists, sharing numerous favorite recipes for specialty pick-me-ups that connoisseurs and home bartenders alike will be clamoring to try. A definitive account of the beverages we love, Wisconsin Cocktails insists we order our Old Fashioneds the right way—with brandy.
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