Hotels: While room service food conjures images of overpriced fare that’s often soggy and cold, hotels are starting to change perceptions of their meal offerings. The European
Boscolo Hotel Group has created a
room service menu that details what goes into creating each meal before it’s wheeled to your room. As with any typical cookbook, the menu includes ingredient measurements, cooking tips and preparation time. It also includes tantalizing pictures to inspire your order. The recipes are even graded according to difficulty. For example, the Bruschetta appetizer, which takes only eight minutes to make and is rated “easy,” drives home the point that simple food can also be high-quality and delicious. Wouldn’t it be great if airlines would follow suit?
Grocery Stores: A new greengrocer in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles offers a fraction of what is available on
Whole Foods’ abundantly stocked shelves, yet shoppers will want for nothing. Set in a small former gallery space,
Cookbook sells a select assortment of
local, sustainably grown food sourced from trusted farms and vendors. True to its name, the shop sells a number of great cookbooks – including
Homegrown by owner
Marta Teegan – that encourage shoppers to make home cooked meals from the bounty of ingredients they buy. Cookbook offers prepared meals from a different highlighted book each week (made by local catering darlings,
Heirloom-LA). Eventually, the shop hopes to offer gardening and cooking classes, but for now neighborhood foodies will have to settle for using their own kitchens.
Fairs: While book fairs may seem like a natural place to find food related manuscripts, the literati hasn’t always known what to make of chef authors and recipe-based memoirs. Now, niche cookbook fairs are starting to appear as places for publishers, agents, authors and fans of the gastronomic genre to mix. The first ever
Paris Cookbook Fair was held earlier this year serving up potential book deals and, unlike typical book fairs, food and wine samplings. In Portland, Oregon,
a city known for the creativity of its cuisine scene, the
“Eat My Words” cookbook symposium has become an annual forum for the region’s most renowned chefs, writers and readers to, well, dish. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) With events like these feeding the cookbook craze, we anticipate some spicy new reads.
