Book review: Eating With the Chefs

The Chez Panisse staff breaks for family meal.

Eating With The Chefs: Family Meals from the World’s Most Creative Restaurants by Per-Anders Jörgensen (Phaidon, 2014. $59.95; www.phaidon.com).
 
We’ve all heard the adage that you eat first with your eyes, and Eating With the Chefs allows you to do just that, but it also gets down to the business of cooking. Swedish food photographer Per-Anders Jörgensen —who with his wife Lotta launched the food magazine Fool, which focuses on photography, fun and some of the world’s great chefs—wrote this book. It features “family meals” that some of those world class chefs and their staffs prepare for themselves.

After you’ve enjoyed the visual feast of the book’s 200 photographs, you can study the recipes from 18 restaurants around the world. Jörgensen chose the restaurants for their staff meal traditions. Recipes are provided with measurements for two, six, 20 and 50 servings, depending on whether you want to feed a couple or a crowd.

As Jörgensen writes in his introduction to Eating With the Chefs, “The contents not only document the evolution and future of staff meals in restaurants, but offer a glimpse of the future of casual dining. It will not be long before the staff meal moves out of professional kitchens and becomes the theme of the restaurant itself.” Among the 50 recipes are Apple Compote with Apple Streusel Topping from The French Laundry; Ribs and Green Beans from Roberta’s, NYC; Taiwanese Pork Buns from wd~50 in NYC; Summer Vegetable Soup with Pesto from Chez Panisse and Quark Pillows with Wapsie Valley Corn and Grilled Peaches from Blue Hill at Stone Barns.