The Bear has finally returned to grace our screens after an agonizing year of waiting. If you’ve missed the banter and delicious dishes during this waiting period or just want to dive deeper into what makes restaurants (and people) tick between episodes, these picks will satisfy your craving!
The French Kitchen by Kristy Cambron
Kat Fontaine is an expat living in post-WWII Paris who is trying to navigate postwar life after serving in the American Office of Strategic Services. Amist cooking classes with legendary chef and former spy Julia Child, she begins to uncover secrets that challenge everything she thought she knew about her mysterious husband and missing brother. What she finds links her to the year 1943, when a chef and spy named Manon Altier made a horrifying discovery that shook her faith in the French Resistance to its core. Will Kat and Manon be absolved by the truth, or will the past haunt them forever?
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Eat a Peach by David Chang
David Chang is a chef and TV personality best known for his Momofuku restaurant company and the documentary Ugly Delicious. In this memoir, Chang re-examines his convoluted relationship with bipolar disorder and the world around him, ultimately revealing the power of food to reshape our view of life. Chang’s story serves as a powerful reminder that our lives are defined by the choices we make, not the circumstances we are born into.
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Burn the Place by Iliana Regan
Iliana Reagan’s first foray into the world of food began as a child in rural Indiana, where she ventured into the forest for plants and berries long after her siblings had lost interest. This raw connection to the earth and its ingredients became her anchor, guiding her through episodes of alcoholism to the kitchen. From a fifteen-year-old in her first restaurant job to a confident woman running her own kitchen, Regan takes the reader on a journey like no other that challenges our perception of what it means to be a chef.
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Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
Twenty-two-year-old Tess lands a front-of-house job in a famous New York City restaurant, hoping to find herself in the city that never sleeps. What she finds surpasses and subverts her expectations, and she is thrown into the brutal, high-octane New York restaurant scene. Whether or not Tess’s life has been changed for the better is uncertain, but one thing is clear: the small-town girl that drove into the city is gone forever.
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Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradal
Mariel Prager has a lot on her plate. The Lakeside Supper Club, inherited from her grandmother, isn’t turning a profit, her mother has refused to leave the church for a week, and her husband Ned is going through an identity crisis. Then tragedy strikes, leading Mariel and Ned back to The Lakeside Supper Club, where they are forced to re-evaluate what they hold dear and how they want to be remembered. Readers will be breathless as they follow Mariel and Ned from the darkness of grief and despair to the glimmering light of hope.
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The Wedding People by Alison Espach
After separating from her husband, Phoebe Stone takes the trip of a lifetime to the Cornwall Inn with one simple mission: end her own life. But the entire inn is booked for a wedding, so everyone assumes she’s just another wedding guest. Phoebe finds herself in an unexpected friendship with the bride and the guests that hinder her plans and slowly stoke her desire to live despite feelings of grief and failure regarding her marriage. At times hilarious and devastating, The Wedding People is an ode to how chaos and suffering can bind us together.
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Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky may be sisters, but they couldn’t be more different. After the unexpected death of their sister Nicky, the bonds between them began to deteriorate. When their childhood apartment in New York City is put up for sale, the three sisters must reunite to stop the sale and confront the gaping loss of the only person capable of holding them together. Grief and addiction create barriers between these sisters until they eventually discover that being honest with oneself is the only way to make peace with loss and find beauty in life once more.
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Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Michelle Zauner is best known for her music career in the band Japanese Breakfast, but this memoir invites readers into a complex narrative of family and identity held together by food. From her experiences as one of the only Asian American kids at school in Oregon to her college ventures across the country to her mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, Zauner illuminates the powerful links between food, family, and memory.
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Notes from a Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi
Kwame Onwuachi’s culinary coming-of-age was a nonlinear, grueling path. From selling drugs in New York City to finding his way in rural Nigeria to starring on Top Chef as a contestant and later a judge, he never gave up on his dream of cooking the dishes he was passionate about. With honesty and heart, Onwuachi illustrates the challenges of navigating the cutthroat culinary landscape as a person of color and inspires others to chase their dreams, even if the path is different than they imagined.
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The Bartender’s Cure by Wesley Straton
Samantha’s life is falling apart. Her breakup has left her listless, so she decides to delay law school for a year and flee to her best friend’s apartment in New York City. When a neighborhood bar offers her a job, Samantha accepts and quickly falls in love with bartending and the community surrounding her. But her harmful habits from the past begin to resurface, forcing Sam to decide between the life she thought she wanted and an unfamiliar, exciting future.
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Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle
Ever since his father died, Konstantin Duhovny has been haunted by ghosts, but instead of seeing them, he has the unique ability to taste their favorite foods. He discovers that he can reunite people with the deceased while they eat one of his dishes and immerses himself in the dynamic world of New York restaurants. But a crisis is brewing in the Afterlife, and only one person knows that Konstantin’s operation must be shut down. There’s just one problem: that person is falling in love with him. Grief, love, and food are intertwined in this gripping, original narrative.
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