Kitchen Arts & Letters

Kitchen Arts & Letters With access to over 12,000 titles, you're bound to find that food or drink book you've been searching for. Cookbooks.
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Imagine being in New York City surrounded by thousands of books. Books on food politics, food scholarship, and craft cocktails. Bookshelves wall to wall and floor to ceiling. It might sound like a dream, but it also sounds like our shop, Kitchen Arts & Letters. Don't let the sheer quantity of titles overwhelm you. Our shop is set up for carefree perusing if that's what you want. Our team is also a

wealth of knowledge -- they're experts in all things food and drink. Whether you want to read about Christina Tosi's famous NYC cookie recipes or get a copy of White Heat, we'll know right where to find it.

Looking for some cooking inspiration for these warm-weather months? Look no further! The Kitchen Arts and Letters cookbo...
06/17/2026

Looking for some cooking inspiration for these warm-weather months? Look no further! The Kitchen Arts and Letters cookbook club has you covered.

For this summer’s sessions our chef, instructor, and culinary historian extraordinaire Annette Tomei (.eat.and.tell) has selected Hetty Lui McKinnon’s () thoughtful and intentional salad-oriented book, Linger, for July

In August we escape the heat of the kitchen with Mayukh Sen’s (.sen) insightful biography of seven immigrant woman whose work impacted the trajectory of American cuisine, Taste Makers.

And in September we’ll explore the connections and distinctions among tropical island cuisines with Von Diaz’s () Islas.

You can join for one month or all three—and the books are included in your membership! If you already have the book(s) we will happily make a substitute of any similarly priced title that has your interest.

We’ll meet twice a month on Zoom for a smart, curious, opinionated conversation among a community of food and cooking enthusiasts!

Please click the link in our bio to learn more!

🎉🥳SIGNED COPIES!!!🥳🎉The Hot Dog Cookbook is a brightly illustrated celebration of the hot dog as a global phenomenon, wi...
06/16/2026

🎉🥳SIGNED COPIES!!!🥳🎉

The Hot Dog Cookbook is a brightly illustrated celebration of the hot dog as a global phenomenon, with enough regional variety to surprise even the most committed frankfurter enthusiast.

Farideh Sadeghin () has done the world a favor by documenting how widely the humble hot dog has traveled and adapted. The Sonoran dog, which crossed up from Mexico and found a devoted following in Arizona, arrives wrapped in bacon on a pillowy steamed bun with jalapeño sauce. Idaho’s contribution skips the bun entirely, serving its dog in a baked potato loaded with cheddar and bacon.

Iceland’s Pylsa is dressed with remoulade, sweet mustard, and both crispy and raw onions, and is made with a blend of lamb, pork, and beef. Germany contributes currywurst, and Chile offers the Completo Italiano, whose name promises one thing and delivers something rather different: avocado, lime, and mayonnaise.

Sadeghin also brings her own ideas to the table, including hot dog flautas, and weaves in lore and history throughout. Her book is genuinely fun to read and useful to cook from—a combination that’s harder to pull off than it sounds.

The physical package is charming too: a padded, bun-like cover and a mustard-squiggle ribbon marker. A good gift, and a good book in its own right.

A Rainbow Palate is an illuminating history of food coloring and chemical confidence.In 19th-century Britain, coal tar d...
06/15/2026

A Rainbow Palate is an illuminating history of food coloring and chemical confidence.

In 19th-century Britain, coal tar dyes, first developed for textiles, found their way into food. That unlikely journey is the focus of Carolyn Cobbold’s book, a rigorously documented but accessible exploration of how industrial chemistry entered the kitchen, the market, and the public imagination.

Bright synthetic colors offered convenience and visual appeal, but they also raised concerns about adulteration, safety, and the limits of scientific authority. Cobbold, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, connects these debates to broader cultural and political shifts in the period, showing how questions about food coloring mirrored deeper tensions over modernization and trust.

While the book centers on Britain, its insights resonate more widely, especially in an era still wrestling with how to evaluate the risks and rewards of chemical additives.

Scholarly without being remote, and strengthened by its focused scope, it offers valuable perspective to food historians, science-minded readers, and anyone curious about how we came to eat with our eyes.

Carter Hiyama () has spent five years photographing restaurants, and On Service is the first collection from that projec...
06/14/2026

Carter Hiyama () has spent five years photographing restaurants, and On Service is the first collection from that project. His stated interest is in the people who give a restaurant life, the energy of a busy service, and the small details that reveal what a place cares about — and the photographs deliver on that more than on any portrait of the specific establishments involved.

There are more than thirty restaurants represented, from Anajak Thai in Sherman Oaks to Atomix in New York. Photos from different locations are scattered throughout without evident organization. What accumulates instead is a collective impression of hospitality culture: plated food, light-flooded empty kitchens, crowded passes, prep lists, cooks at work.

California and Oregon locations make up most of the roster, and the selection reflects Hiyama’s personal history as much as any attempt at breadth. His notes acknowledge the particular influence of time spent at Bell’s in Los Alamos, CA and at Anajak Thai.

Twenty percent of proceeds benefit Southern Smoke Foundation (), which provides emergency relief grants and mental health services to hospitality workers nationwide.

An unusually honest portrait of how restaurants actually look and feel from the inside.

Prepping this year’s window. Three stacks so far, and we’re still going! Let us know your favorites!🏳️‍⚧️📓🤎📕📙💛📗📘💜
06/11/2026

Prepping this year’s window. Three stacks so far, and we’re still going! Let us know your favorites!

🏳️‍⚧️📓🤎📕📙💛📗📘💜

This series of small square books (5.75” x 5.75”, 208 pages) comes from a Parisian publishing house dedicated to design ...
06/10/2026

This series of small square books (5.75” x 5.75”, 208 pages) comes from a Parisian publishing house dedicated to design history, Masala Noir (.noir). The books let the designs speak for themselves, offering no supporting text, and no discernable organization, simply reproducing artwork from around ine world created with marketing in mind. This minor chaos
in mind, they’re fascinating to browse!

Anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese (), professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Aust...
06/08/2026

Anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese (), professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, examines food not simply as sustenance, but as a means through which Black communities create connection, care, and resilience. Expanding on a broader multimedia project, also called Gather, Reese considers how everyday acts surrounding food (cooking, gardening, mourning, celebrating, organizing) become forms of collective nourishment and mutual support.

Structured around four places and types of gathering—gardens, family reunions, repasts, and protests—the book combines ethnographic research, personal narrative, and cultural analysis to explore the relationship between food and community life. Reese argues that many of the practices associated with “food justice” already exist within Black communal traditions, often outside institutional frameworks.

More reflective than prescriptive, Gather situates food within broader conversations about memory, inequality, ritual, and care, offering a thoughtful study of how people sustain one another through shared meals and shared space.

Amazing to see the and team open here in NYC at First Ave and St. Marks Pl. There’s a line but it moves fast and the t...
06/07/2026

Amazing to see the and team open here in NYC at First Ave and St. Marks Pl. There’s a line but it moves fast and the tacos, the quesadillas, the potatoes—all first rate. From Mexico to Manhattan!

Ice Cream for Small Plants (1937) is the ideal cookbook for those kitchens in which ten gallons of ice cream is a casual...
06/05/2026

Ice Cream for Small Plants (1937) is the ideal cookbook for those kitchens in which ten gallons of ice cream is a casual volume. According to a survey published a few years prior to this book, 65%–85% of all soda fountain income was generated from sales in which ice cream was a component.

The incentivizing economics of including frozen treats on any menu, then, are obvious and, as author Etta H. Handy further emphasizes, are only improved by in-house manufacture. But that is not to say making ice cream entirely from scratch has the same benefits. Handy’s approach adroitly keeps business goals at the fore, opting for “ice cream mix” as the base to which sweeteners, flavorings, and inclusions are added—a suitable compromise for small businesses.

Most recipes here start with five gallons of ice cream mix and include flavors like black walnut, peppermint stick, persimmon, maple sugar, and southern rose. Not at all neglected, ices, sherbets, frappes, souffles, bisques, custards, puddings, mousses, parfaits, and punches also make a strong showing for the lunchcounter operator ready to expand their offerings.

Siblings Patricia ()and Emanuel () de Sousa created their supper club in the Portuguese city of Porto to blur the bounda...
06/03/2026

Siblings Patricia ()and Emanuel () de Sousa created their supper club in the Portuguese city of Porto to blur the boundaries between restaurants and home cooking through artfully composed communal meals. This dramatically photographed book reveals the creativity they bring to that effort.

Their book The Townhouse Kitchen Supper Club is divided into halves called “Mountain” and “Sea,” more than a hundred recipes follow the seasonal rhythms and ingredients of Portugal and its Atlantic surroundings. Beyond those broad gestures, the organization is somewhat opaque: stewed octopus with smoked paprika is followed by a martini made with vinho verde and medronho brandy, and then by venison tartare. A corn gazpacho served with a paper-thin polenta precedes pork belly rolled in barbecue sauce and served with cucumber salad.

The imagination is more obvious than the system, but their notes on pantry essentials and the practicalities of cooking for groups run throughout, with genuine attention to adaptability: working with common ingredients, reworking leftovers, adjusting to what’s available. Photographs and design reflect the same attention to place and atmosphere that runs through the recipes.

Note that the book’s two halves work in opposite directions: if you open from the cover marked “Mountain,” you’ll need to flip it over to read “Sea.”

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