On the Table: Food Memoirs

Adam Platt has been a contributing editor and restaurant critic for New York magazine since 2000. He won the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for Restaurant Reviews in 2010. In his funny and irreverent memoir The Book of Eating: Adventures in Professional Gluttony (Ecco), Adam Platt recounts a globe-trotting life lived meal-to-meal. As the son of a diplomat growing up in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, Adam Platt didn’t have the chance to become a picky eater. From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, re-tracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Intertwining food and travel, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age.

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Travel + Leisure, the London Review of Books, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian, among other publications. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life, and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo. He teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program. He is the author of Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (a Memoir with Recipes) (Harper). In Soviet Belarus, where Fishman was born, good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. These spoils kept Boris’ family—Jews who lived under threat of discrimination and violence—provided-for and protected. Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Boris’ family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding their trauma? His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Brooklyn. Savage Feast is Boris’ tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love.

Kwame Onwuachi is the James Beard Award-winning executive chef at Kith/Kin and owner of the Philly Wing Fry franchise in Washington, D.C. Trained at the Culinary Institute of America, Onwuachi is a former Top Chef contestant. He has been named one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs and is a 30 Under 30 honoree by both Zagat and Forbes. In his memoir Notes from a Young Black Chef, Kwame Onwuachi tells an extraordinary tale. Born on Long Island and raised in the Bronx; he was sent to rural Nigeria by his mother to “learn respect.” Still, after coming back, he fell with the wrong crowd — but was saved by his love of cooking and food. He embarked on a new beginning as a chef on board a Deepwater Horizon cleanup ship, the bottom of the culinary food chain. From this modest start to working at some of the best restaurants in the world, Onwuachi was forced to grapple with just how unwelcoming the world of fine dining can be for people of color. Notes from a Young Black Chef is a heartfelt, and shockingly honest story of chasing your dreams—even when they don’t turn out as you expected—The Washington Post says  “Onwuachi’s memoir should be required reading, not just for future chefs, but for anyone who wants a glimpse into one man’s tale of what it’s like to be young, black and ambitious in America.”