Family Table: Favorite staff meals from our restaurants to your home
Danny Meyer’s restaurants are among the most acclaimed in the nation, winners of an unprecedented number of James Beard awards. Family Table, by Karen Stabiner and chef Michael Romano, goes behind the scenes – to share over 150 recipes that staff members share before service begins, as well as stories of the restaurants’ often unsung heroes. A collection of the best restaurant meals you’ll never see on a menu.
“The stories and recipes encapsulate the passion that chefs should show while preparing their ‘family’s’ meals.” – Daniel Boulud
A Top Ten cookbook, a “solid and accessible collection of more than 150 recipes.” - Publishers Weekly
Featured in “Cook the Book” on seriouseats.com here.
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The Valentino Cookbook
In 1972, with limited funds and only a modest culinary background, Piero Selvaggio opened a small Italian restaurant in a decidedly unglamorous Santa Monica neighborhood. Now, 45 years later, Selvaggio continues to welcome guests to his Santa Monica, California restaurant. The Valentino Cookbook draws on Selvaggio's extensive experience as a restaurateur, a culinary explorer, and, most of all, a lover of food and wine.
"This book makes me fall in love with Italian food all over again because the recipes are made in traditional ways with pure ingredients, seasonally ripe and locally grown." - Alice Waters
". . . a splendid collection of recipes and prose that reflects many years of relentless passion and dedication to the Italian culinary culture. A must-have cookbook." - Lidia Bastianich, owner, Felidia and Becco
"I've always looked to Valentino as the mother yeast of genuine hospitality. Piero Selvaggio knows intuitively how to make people feel good by sharing things that taste good. That spirit of generosity is also pervasive in The Valentino Cookbook. It's a wonderful collection of the restaurant's recipes, caringly written in a way that will make any home cook feel like a winner." - Danny Meyer, co-author of The Union Square Cafe Cookbook
"Over the years, Piero Selvaggio has introduced me to dozens of wonderful wines that always seem to match up seamlessly with the food from Valentino's kitchen. It would be enough if this book revealed the secrets of the Italian-American kitchen as well as it does. What a bonus for it to succeed at suggesting just how that wine-and-food magic works." - Harvey Steiman, editor at large, Wine Spectator
"Valentino, in Los Angeles, is thought by many to be the best Italian restaurant in the United States. Reading Piero Selvaggio's account of its extremely modest beginnings -- and his own, in Sicily -- makes the refinement of the food he has created seem all the more amazing. ''I never set foot in a restaurant until I was 16 years old,'' Selvaggio confides in his charming introduction to THE VALENTINO COOKBOOK (Villard, $34.95), written with Karen Stabiner. A year later he was in New York, with a job washing dishes in a cafeteria at New York University. Soon thereafter, a co-worker took him out for his first ''patty of meat on round bread and these beautiful golden strips of potato.'' Selvaggio knew nothing of Italian food either, and when, at the age of 27, he wound up running a restaurant, he went back home to learn. What is served at Valentino, in any case, is not the traditional cuisine of any Italian region; American wide-open opportunity and brash inventiveness also figure in its origins." – The New York Times