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April 11, 2019 @ 6:30 pm
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Chef Allen’s Special Farm-to-Table Dinner: AUTHOR EDITION featuring EDWARD LEE and more!
Chef Allen’s Farm-to-Table: AUTHOR EDITION
Featuring
Chef Edward Lee and his book
Buttermilk Graffiti (Artisan, $15.95)
Thursday, April 11, 6:30pm
The Café at Books & Books, Coral Gables
(Book talk to follow dinner at 8pm)
About the Book:
Semifinalist, 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards
“Thoughtful, well researched, and truly moving. Shines a light on what it means to cook and eat American food, in all its infinitely nuanced and ever-evolving glory.”
—Anthony Bourdain
American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavors. But for Edward Lee, who, like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton, is as much a writer as he is a chef, that first surprising bite is just the beginning. What about the people behind the food? What about the traditions, the innovations, the memories?
A natural-born storyteller, Lee decided to hit the road and spent two years uncovering fascinating narratives from every corner of the country. There’s a Cambodian couple in Lowell, Massachusetts, and their efforts to re-create the flavors of their lost country. A Uyghur café in New York’s Brighton Beach serves a noodle soup that seems so very familiar and yet so very exotic—one unexpected ingredient opens a window onto an entirely unique culture. A beignet from Café du Monde in New Orleans, as potent as Proust’s madeleine, inspires a narrative that tunnels through time, back to the first Creole cooks, then forward to a Korean rice-flour hoedduckand a beignet dusted with matcha.
Sixteen adventures, sixteen vibrant new chapters in the great evolving story of American cuisine. And forty recipes, created by Lee, that bring these new dishes into our own kitchens.
About:
Chef Edward Lee is the author of Smoke & Pickles; the chef/owner of 610 Magnolia, MilkWood, and Whiskey Dry in Louisville, Kentucky; and culinary director of Succotash in Penn Quarter, Washington, D.C., and National Harbor, Maryland. Esquire named his pop-up restaurant, Mr. Lee’s at Succotash, one of 2018’s Best New Restaurants in America. He appears frequently in print and on television, earning an Emmy nomination for his role in the Emmy Award–winning PBS series The Mind of a Chef. Most recently, he wrote and hosted the feature documentary Fermented. He lives in Louisville and Washington, D.C.
Chef Norman Van Aken is known for introducing “Fusion” into the lexicon of modern global cookery! His memoir, “No Experience Necessary” has been hailed by Tony Bourdain, Thomas Keller, Emeril Lagasse, and many more. He is a multiple James Beard Award Recipient and was honored as one of the “Founders of the New American Cuisine”. He’s authored six cookbooks and is the Chef-Owner of NORMAN’S at the Ritz-Carlton, Grande Lakes, Orlando. He opened a Miami based cooking school, “In the Kitchen with Norman Van Aken” as well as “Three”, a fine dining restaurant and “No. 3 Social” a roof-deck lounge.
Chef Allen Susser is a winner of the prestigious James Beard Award. He is the culinary director of The Café at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Miami Beach and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. Under his direction, the Café at Books & Books serves locally caught and sustainable produced fruits, vegetables, fish and seafood products. Chef Allen’s personal culinary viewpoint has been established since 1986 when he opened Chef Allen’s, a groundbreaking Miami restaurant. The New York Times called Allen the “Ponce De Leon of New Florida cooking.” Food & Wine magazine named Chef Allen “One of the Best 10 Chefs in America”.
Carlos Frias is a 2018 James Beard Award winner and the food & dining editor of the Miami Herald.