The Best Way to Test a Cookbook? Try It at a Restaurant

After seeing posts from Agi’s Counter in New York City pop onto his Instagram Explore page, chef Jeremy Fox felt compelled to message its chef, Jeremy Salamon. “I was like, I think we’re soulmates or something,” recalls Fox, the chef and owner of Los Angeles’s Birdie G’s and Rustic Canyon. Salamon’s food reminded Fox of restaurants he reveres: Prune, Zuni Cafe, Cafe Mutton.

The two became friends and met for the first time when Fox was visiting NYC last fall. When planning out the promotion of his debut cookbook, Second Generation: Hungarian and Jewish Classics Reimagined for the Modern Table (out now from Harvest), Salamon reached out to Fox about a dinner at Birdie G’s during his book tour.

That dinner, which took place on October 1, brought Agi’s hits — like chicken liver mousse with grapes on Pullman bread, and cheesecake topped with olive oil — to Birdie G’s, which rounded out the menu with its own dishes. It was a natural pairing: Both restaurants draw on their chefs’ grandmothers as inspiration for both the food and the name (Salamon’s is Agi, Fox’s is Gladys). Later that month, Fox’s other restaurant, Rustic Canyon, also hosted a dinner featuring Joe Yonan’s Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking.

For some cookbook authors, restaurant collaborations like these have become standard parts of the book tour, an extension of the existing collab trend. This seems especially true for restaurant chefs like Salamon. When Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson of LA’s Kismet released their cookbook of the same name earlier this year, they did two nights of service at Birdie’s in Austin. And this fall, Renee Erickson of Seattle’s Sea Creatures restaurant group has collaborated with restaurants across the country including Row 34 in Boston, Saint Julivert in NYC, and the Progress in San Francisco for her new cookbook, Sunlight & Breadcrumbs.

This approach isn’t limited to restaurant chefs: Recently, authors like Betty Liu, Khushbu Shah, Rebekah Peppler, and Jon Kung have also leaned on their food-world connections during their book tours. For both author and restaurant, the cookbook dinner is a strategic play toward networking and cross-promotion. For diners, the benefit is twofold: dinner, of course, but also the opportunity to vet a cookbook by eating from it first. Ideally, they’ll like the food enough to buy it.

As with Salamon’s Second Generation dinner, some of these collaborations rely on a culinary affinity between chefs. Betty Liu spent publication day for her cookbook The Chinese Way at the New York Chinese restaurant Tolo (it had also hosted a dinner for Kung’s Kung Food in June), which offered five recipes from the book, including a congee with watercress puree and steamed cod with black garlic sauce.

These dishes were, for the most part, recreated true to Liu’s recipes, but with minor tweaks better suited for the restaurant setting. While Liu asks home cooks to make a hyper-simple sauce by mashing black garlic into browned butter, for example, Tolo’s chef-owner Ron Yan gave the idea a restaurant-y zhuzh by emulsifying the sauce instead.

Some collaborations mash up more disparate cuisines. For the release of Amrikan, her cookbook about the Indian American diaspora, Khushbu Shah spent much of her book tour hosting “Indian pizza parties” at restaurants nationwide, including New York’s Lord’s, D.C.’s Oyster Oyster, and Seattle’s Musang. A recent partnership with New Orleans’s Turkey and the Wolf featured po’boys served with the book’s kale pakoras and a riff on Shah’s crispy paneer sandwich, made with mozzarella sticks.

When it comes to menu development for these collaborations, “we have conversations with the folks that are hosting, and I’ll suggest things, and then they’ll interpret it into their own language of how their restaurant functions,” says Erickson. In addition to having been a guest chef, she hosts chefs like Salamon, who held a cookbook dinner at Erickson’s restaurant the Whale Wins.

That open-minded approach mirrors how Erickson hopes people will use her cookbooks. “For me, writing a cookbook isn’t to say, you do it this way,” she says. “It’s to give an idea to the world and hope people can be inspired to adapt it into their life.”

Turning books into all-encompassing experiences is a growing desire beyond the cookbook space: A new company called 831 Stories wants to build a lifestyle around the romance novels that it will also publish. Its founders have mused that this could mean meet-ups, spin-off content, and merch that mirrors clothing mentioned in the books.

From the restaurant end, hosting guest chefs is “not exactly the most profitable thing,” Erickson says. Generally, her restaurants might schedule them on nights when sales are softer in order to bring in more traffic; a guest chef can also be a way to offer something different to old regulars.

But the practical reason why these partnerships have become so popular is that they’re mutually beneficial promotion. The cookbook author — Salamon, for example — gets to cook for a new audience. It might be far-away fans who haven’t yet gotten a chance to visit New York to go to Agi’s; it might be Birdie G’s diners who want to try something slightly different within the trappings of a place they already know. Birdie G’s, meanwhile, gets traction within and new interest from Agi’s and Salamon’s existing fans — maybe Agi’s devotees put the restaurant on their list for the next time they’re in LA.

“People get to experience [Salamon’s] food, hopefully they buy the book and then become a follower later on,” says Karly Stillman, the publicist behind Second Generation. “It lends itself to further relationships.”

For chefs like Erickson and Fox, that’s the primary motivator of these collaborative cookbook dinners. “We’re just really excited for the chance to see another viewpoint and absorb what we can from them,” Fox says. It’s not the finances or the followers, but the networking: the ability to work with new chefs, offer that opportunity to their staff, and provide guests with genuine hospitality. It’s hard to do a book tour; a welcoming kitchen is a soft place to land.

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