It’s almost the best time of year: the season to lay out a picnic blanket and read outside in the sunshine. The season’s new food-related releases are ready to deliver on this experience. This spring sees the launch of a few exciting memoirs: There are compelling stories of women finding their way through food, including a moody reflection about pushing through hardship to taste sweetness; an engaging narrative about life after being a “girl-king” and what it means to rewrite long-held appetites; an endearing story about embodying the spirit of “extra sauce”; and an unexpected entree into culinary school, with all its challenges and rewards. Plus, there’s a gossipy look into a formative era of French cuisine and a thought-provoking analysis of food and power. Happy reading.

Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live
Amber Husain

Washington Square Press, out now

In a world fixated on eating — how to do it “correctly,” what our groceries say about us, and so on — Amber Husain, author of Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh, found herself in a “standoff” with food in 2020. In Tell Me How You Eat, Husain writes about food in the context of political radicals, from the breakfast projects of the Black Panthers to food bloggers in modern-day Gaza, angling each chapter around a reason to eat. The book’s intense focus on anorexia and its dense, historical approach might not make it the right choice for every reader. But for those willing to engage difficult topics and interested in delving deeper into the political nature of food, Tell Me How You Eat will challenge you to think about food less as something insular and more as a meaningful resource that can shape the world at large.

The Secret History of French Cooking: The Outlaw Chefs Who Made Food Modern
Luke Barr

Dutton, March 17 

After writing about juggernauts like M.F.K. Fisher (the author’s great-aunt) and Auguste Escoffier, Luke Barr shifts his focus to other imposing presences in the culinary world. His newest book is a lush, gossipy history of 1960s and 1970s France during the rise of nouvelle cuisine. At the time, chefs like Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and Pierre Troisgros “upended” the culinary establishment’s “ossified” haute cuisine, Barr writes. But these men have cast long enough shadows; Barr also writes about the women chefs outside the macho establishment, and a curmudgeonly food critic who hated — among many things — travel, modern hotels, and Americanization. It’s a history book with the page-turning qualities of a good novel.

On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites
Alicia Kennedy

Balance, April 14 

Alicia Kennedy’s follow-up to 2023’s No Meat Required shows the prolific culture writer at the top of her game. While Kennedy’s debut was an overarching history of plant-based eating in the United States, On Eating turns the author’s lens inward as it traces her trajectory from a little girl who loved to eat lamb in Long Island to a vegetarian living in Puerto Rico who sees no less joy in food. “As a girl, I ate like a king,” she writes. Kennedy proves she’s honed her craft, with an extremely engaging and appetizing analysis of her love of food, as well as the forces that have reshaped her own desires. Even in the face of loss, grief, and changing personal ethics, Kennedy makes the case for finding new forms of excitement, abundance, and pleasure in food.

Extra Sauce: The Good, the Bad, and the Onions
Zahra Tangorra

The Dial Press, April 14

For more than five years, Zahra Tangorra ran the beloved and “irreverent” Brooklyn restaurant Brucie. Later, during the pandemic, she gained a similarly devoted following with her Italian American comfort-food pop-up Zaza Lasagna. What brought her there, she writes in the first paragraphs of Extra Sauce, was a bus crash — one that sent her hurtling toward “a completely different story, a blessed second chance.” Tangorra’s prose is fizzy, conversational, and perceptive, and Extra Sauce is an endearing tale of food, family, and finding your own place in the world. Of course, there’s some good restaurant behind-the-scenes stuff, too, even if the thought of Brucie now makes Tangorra cringe. As she writes, “We need a certain amount of feral gaucheness at points in our lives to find our way to grace.” Extra Sauce follows that path and it’s a pleasure to read.

Salt, Sweat & Steam: The Fiery Education of an Accidental Chef
Brigid Washington

St. Martin’s Press, April 28 

Billed as “The Devil Wears Prada for the ‘yes, chef’ generation,” Brigid Washington’s memoir follows the author in the grueling days of culinary school at The Culinary Institute of America — where she reluctantly chose to enroll after a breakup pushes her to get out of New York City. There are injuries, flirtations, squabbles, name-drops, and dishes gone awry. Washington reconstructs vivid scenes and recalls characters from her school years with a sense of ease. Her fast-moving coming-of-age memoir will appeal to anyone who’s been curious about culinary school but hasn’t made the commitment themself. You might even learn a few things.

Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts, and Food
Lydia Pang

HarperOne, May 19 

The season’s moodiest new memoir comes from Lydia Pang, the “misfit” creative director and self-described “aging goth” behind the studio Mørning. Eat Bitter, which is an extension of Pang’s 2020 zine of the same name, owes its name to a Chinese idiom that means to “endure hardship before tasting sweetness.” Anchored by dishes like “radiator char siu” and “scruffy sacred salad,” Pang traces her upbringing in Wales, where she was raised by a Hakka father and a Welsh mother, and into her adulthood in the United States, where she risked burnout for the sake of corporate success before “rewilding” in Portland, Oregon, and returning to Wales. There’s a sulky, snarling swagger to Pang’s writing: She encourages readers to “embrac[e] our shadows” in order to create “ideas that are so substantive and potent, so full of guts that they scream even after we’ve exited the room.” There’s bitterness in Pang’s story, but sweetness, too.

There are two places where a restaurant like the Grand Tier could exist: inside a snowglobe, or inside New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. Luckily, it has been housed in the latter — encased in some 45,000 feet of glass, no less — for the past 60 years, where it offers hungry opera-goers a surreal experience. I have never before, for example, eaten a crab cake while locking eyes with a flying goat in a 30-foot tall Chagall painting, nor have I ended dinner with the trill of a glockenspiel, reminding me that it’s time to finish my dessert and watch Madame Butterfly confront her cheating husband. 

For the Met’s general manager George Krpeyan, that’s just another Tuesday night. A week prior, I called him on the phone to learn more about how the Met manages to feed the thousands of people in its halls, and, particularly, about the feat of the Grand Tier’s intermission service. 

It’s also worth noting that I came on a Met Under 40 night, which offers discounted tickets for folks under 40 years old, and aims to usher in a younger, more diverse audience. It’s also a task that feels especially important in light of recent discussions about the opera’s cultural relevance, which were clumsily and rather insultingly catalyzed by actor Timothée Chalamet’s remarks during a recent interview, and which culminated in a general consensus that, yes, the world of opera and ballet is important. But who gains access to it? 

As the Met’s only public sit-down restaurant (there’s a staff and performer cafeteria, but that’s behind closed doors), the Grand Tier asks its diners to place orders 48 hours in advance, either through an online form or by phone. Otherwise, there’s a handful of standing bars scattered throughout the building where folks can grab a spur-of-the-moment bite that is more accessible, price-wise, than a prix fixe menu; there’s a Black Forest ham and Brie cheese sandwich ($12), a chocolate bar, or, my personal favorite, the espresso martini on-tap, which churns in a Ketel One-branded machine on the counter. “That was my initiative,” Krpeyan tells me, “I started it in 2023.” It’s an adept, on-trend move for the Met, as well as one that keeps orders moving swiftly. Once the opera house’s performance begins, there’s a strict no-entry policy out of respect for performers.  

My plan, I tell Krpeyan, is to load up my plate as humanly (and politely) as possible during the Madama Butterfly break. “Yes, that show has only one intermission, and it’s 30 minutes,” he says, perhaps hinting that I shouldn’t order the roast chicken and a trolley of desserts. Typically, he says, guests will space out their dinner courses an hour before the show, and during its intermission(s). Feeling a little naive, I walk things back. Should I just get a drink? A single dessert? Should I come back some other time to eat a chicken over the course of a multi-intermission Wagner? “Oh, no,” Krpeyan assures me, unfazed, “I know it sounds like it will be too short. But it’s quite calm. You won’t feel rushed. You won’t even notice how [smoothly] it runs.” 

Krpeyan has been working at the Met for the past five years, and as a general manager in New York restaurants for 20 years in NYC, where he cut his teeth in especially high-pressure environments such as steakhouses. It’s no wonder, then, that he can so elegantly wrangle the needs of the roughly 150-ish diners who come to the Grand Tier nightly. “I also have to credit James [Alongi], our maitre d’,” he tells me, “in terms of keeping the flow [moving] and guests happy. [The diners] love him, they’ll ask to see him when they come in. He is a really cool character.” 

Alongi has an ease and lyricism to his communication style that feels so utterly New York, and that is such a far throw from any haughtiness. “I think of opera as a generational thing. You kind of have to be brought into it by someone,” he tells me over the phone, “but I don’t come from a background of opera-goers.” Alongi started as the Met’s reservationist almost 25 years ago, and has been in the role of maitre d’ for almost a decade. “I’ve met people from all over the world, all different kinds of people,” he tells me, “I love hearing that someone has traveled all the way from Switzerland, and just had the perfect meal; or that someone used to come and sit at the same table with their grandparents.” As with Krpeyan, Alongi’s work before the Met was a testament to his ability to juggle a fast-paced, large-scale kitchen. “I worked at a Lehman Brothers that was open 24/7,” Alongi says, “We had to feed all those people. When their cafeteria closed, we opened up a night service. That’s when our show began.”  

The Grand Tier’s menu consists of what I call velvet curtain classics: Starters include but are not limited to a white asparagus soup, duck rillette, and a shellfish platter; there are two options for Osetra caviar, and main courses such as a half roast chicken, sheep’s milk agnolotti, king salmon, and more; the dessert menu spills over with cookies and petit fours, a Russian honey cake, and — a springtime special this season — the sakura mochi (made with raspberry, chocolate, and peach), amongst other treats. For those folks dining over the course of a two-intermission opera, there is a minimum order of one food item per person, and a recommended prix-fixe order of an appetizer, main, and dessert ($120/head). A few days prior to going to the opera, I filled out my date’s and my dinner form for a fleet of appetizers and desserts, per Krpeyan’s recommendation, in a Google Doc — a welcome, old-school departure from the hells of Resy and text confirmations. It also felt a bit like writing a letter to Santa Claus. But Krpeyan reassured me that all I needed to do was simply show up, and enjoy. 

My date and I devised a game plan: We would book it to the Grand Tier as soon as the lights went on during intermission, and make a pact to not drink too much (water or Champagne) in case we didn’t have time for a restroom stop. We scurried over to the host desk, and within seconds of giving our reservation name, were guided to a window-front table with a prearranged spread of bison carpaccio, crab cakes (one of the most popular items, according to Krpeyan), and root vegetables over labneh. It felt a bit like Christmas morning.   

The normal rules of space-time also don’t feel like they apply in the Met, which works in the Grand Tier’s favor. The normal, anxiety-inducing sounds of a busy restaurant won’t be found there, among the carpeted floors, hushed voices, and twinkle of Sputnik-inspired chandeliers, which are somehow always in the corner of your vision. My partner’s and my minds were still elsewhere, mulling over the first act of Madama Butterfly’s tragedy, when we sat down to eat our parade of buttery and impressively thin beef carpaccio, chocolate ganache, and tête de moine fleurets. The ambiance was surprisingly relaxed and intimate, with many folks dining on a main or dessert course while engrossed in quiet conversation. As Krpeyan explained to me, many of the guests, especially those who anticipate the entire season the way others would March Madness, start their prix fixe meal the hour before the show, making their way through its courses during the intermission(s) to follow at the same table. Our evening’s opera had only one intermission, but I imagine that during, say, a nearly five-hour-long Wagner, that there’s no shortage of double espresso orders. 

Looking around, my fellow diners appeared to be loyal opera attendees, generationally diverse, and partial to Aqua Net, although that’s an oversimplification. During my meal, I saw older women in ball gowns and young men who had clearly just come from work; some people dressed up with their ring lights, some people just dressed not-in-jeans. It feels fair to say that most of the New York City crowd attempts the Saturday crossword puzzle, but there were also plenty of folks coming for what appeared to be special occasions: birthdays, anniversaries, date nights, mom-is-in-town activities. 

The meal was a blur, but I know that by minute 17, we were on our dessert courses (an opera cake and pavlova), and while there was a brief moment of double-fisting my espresso cup and my Champagne glass, we took our final bites just as the chimes started ringing to head back to the theater. My partner even had time to stop at the restroom. 

The elitism of the experience doesn’t escape me. It’s also the closest I’ll probably ever get to living out a real-life movie scene montage, albeit one that owes its magic to the work of the dozens of kitchen staff members and their fastidious, down-to-the-minute kitchen prep. Unsurprisingly, removing the steps of browsing a menu, placing an order, and waiting for food also saves a significant amount of time for the diners. 

As Alongi tells me when we chat by phone days after the opera, many of the guests come to complete the opera season as part of their annual pilgrimage, but there are plenty of first-timers and, like myself, more casual opera-goers. “This is also an important place for tourists,” he tells me, “And I think that’s great. That’s what it should be, too. It’s the [opportunity] to experience something from a different time, that moves at a different pace without a lot of [care]. That’s why a lot of people don’t even want to leave.”  

There is a distinct, bittersweet feeling to leaving Grand Tier. The last time 30 minutes meant this much to me, or felt this fanciful, I think I was downing the contents of my lunchbox during recess before returning to make-believe hobbit games on the playground. Is the rush of that feeling so very different from dining at the opera, in between collective flights of fantasy? Dining during the half-hour intermission at the Met is a luxury, undoubtedly. But unlike so many other indulgences in life, I think this is one I wish everyone could experience. 

To most folks living in Columbus or anywhere in central Ohio, thin-crust, square-cut pizza is just pizza. The pies they grew up with don’t need to be defined or named, but for the sake of clarity, let’s call it “Columbus-style.” It may not be as well-known as pizzas from Chicago, New York, or even New Haven, but the local style has a fierce and loyal following. It routinely beats other cities on national top pizza lists, visitors can eat their way through a citywide pizza trail, and a long and storied history gives the city bona fides just as deep as its peers. 

The local pizza is distinct in a few ways. Columbus pizza-makers roll their dough out thin and score it with a roller docker, which creates small holes that prevent the dough from bubbling in the oven. Most pies are dusted with cornmeal to keep from sticking to stone deck ovens; according to most pizza-makers in the city, the ovens’ stone bottoms are vital to evenly distribute heat, and the porous material absorbs moisture, delivering a crisp crust. The dough is topped with a sweet sauce and balanced by a provolone cheese mix that goes from edge to edge, along with, ideally, pepperoni. Pies arrive on the table cut into “squares,” though in reality they’re often closer to rectangles.

These factors combine into a look and feel that’s instantly recognizable. But Columbus-style pizza isn’t just popular because of its structure; it’s also relatively affordable. A pie is roughly $20, in contrast to pies that can easily start at $30 in cities like Los Angeles and New York. That makes Columbus pizza accessible to the city’s loyal student sports fans, who often cheer on nationally ranked and locally cherished teams like the Ohio State University’s Buckeyes with game day pizza sales. When the wildly popular team plays rival Michigan, it’s all hands on deck at pizzerias. 

Pizza “is infused into the culture of this city,” says Jim Ellison, the author of Columbus Pizza: A Slice of History. “There’s three things that you can expect people will have a conversation with you about in Columbus: the weather, Ohio State — football in particular — and pizza.” 

And the style is gaining traction beyond the city limits, popping up on menus across the Midwest. If you don’t know Columbus’s pizza already, you might soon. 

Like so many American pizza styles, Columbus-style pizza got its start when Italian immigrants arrived in the region. Tat Ristorante Di Famiglia started the trend in 1929, opening in a neighborhood once referred to as Flytown for its proximity to the city’s airport (although Tat has jumped around a few times during its nearly 100-year run). The restaurant served pizza as a snack or appetizer, which was common at the time. 

A few decades later, Jimmy Massey and Romeo Sirij opened Romeo’s, the first proper pizzeria in the city. Their inspiration was likely two-fold, says Ellison. Sirij was a wine salesman, and he may have seen how popular pizza pies were while making deliveries to Tat. Meanwhile, Massey had been a baker in Chicago, where tavern-style pizza, meticulously cut into easy-to-eat rectangles, was becoming popular. “I’ve got to think that at some point in time, he was at a bar in Chicago and he said, ‘Hey, I kind of like this square cut thing. It’s easier to share,’” Ellison says. “They’re slightly different styles, but they’re definitely in the same family.”

Whereas Chicago developed several styles of pizza, ranging from the square-cut tavern-style that Massey encountered to the thick deep-dish pies that tourists associate with the city, Columbus stuck with thin crust. When it comes to deep dish or thicker crust, “I don’t know if people really go for that. It’s so filling, and it’s kind of rich,” says Tom Iannarino, the second-generation owner of Terita’s Pizzeria. What people go for, at Terita’s at least, are thin-crust pies made with a recipe that hasn’t changed much since Iannarino’s father opened the shop in 1959.

Whether the slice is called tavern cut, party slice, or square, the shape is an important element of what makes a Columbus-style pizza, but the toppings are just as crucial. 

Early pizzerias in Columbus mostly got their cheese (often provolone) and other toppings from DiPaolo Foods, an Italian grocery store-turned-food distributor (now run under the name RDP). The longtime vendor did more than sell goods, though; it influenced and standardized how pizza was made in the region and supported fledgling businesses. Richie DiPaolo started making and selling cardboard boxes to make pizzas easier to transport, and he worked with Vlasic to jar presliced peppers, a common addition to pies. 

The most popular topping, though, is pepperoni, specifically, the amount thereof. Pizzerias pride themselves on how many slices they can fit on each pie. Massey’s, which Jimmy opened a few years after Romeo’s, boasts 155 pepperoni slices per large pie, while Donatos, a locally owned chain, fits 100. Old-world-style sausage casings, which curl in the heat of the oven, cause the pepperoni to shrink into perfect little cups of grease. Many local pizzerias’ menus note the name of their sausage provider — Ezzo Sausage Co. — another Columbus family business.

At every level, family businesses drive Columbus-style pizza. At Terita’s, Iannarino has his son, who represents the business’s third generation, run the pizzeria’s social media. At Minelli’s, Jeff Ferrelli inherited the shop his dad opened in 1967, and Jeff’s twin daughters, Kaci and Kelli, joined the family business after graduating from Ohio State. Massey’s, which has franchised and expanded to 15 locations, is still a family business, albeit run by a different family after Jimmy Massey sold the company to his long-time employee, Guido Casa. 

Jim Grote, the man behind Donatos, didn’t invent the crispy-crusted, edge-to-edge topping pizzas that Columbus loves, but he “certainly made it popular, not just here, but elsewhere too,” says Bob Vitale, the dining reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. Today, the chain has more than 170 locations in 12 states.

The story of Donatos starts like many other pizzerias in Columbus. Grote bought a pizzeria in 1963 with a loan from his family. His parents made the sausages, his mom made the dough, and his kids all worked in the store. At one point, the pizzeria sat right in front of the family’s house, and customers would wait for their pizzas in the family’s home.

But Grote had larger ambitions. He was obsessed with consistency — he weighed each pie and looked for tools to help create efficiency in the pizzeria. Donatos later shifted from traditional deck ovens to conveyor belt ovens for greater consistency. One of his early inventions, the Peppamatic, sliced pepperoni to a consistent thickness and placed the slices evenly across a pie, edge to edge.

Grote even got a copyright on the marketing phrase “edge to edge” and took Pizza Hut to court in 1996 when it launched a campaign for a pizza called “the Edge.” Donatos won a $5 million settlement for copyright infringement. A few years later, Donatos had another run-in with a major fast-food chain. McDonald’s bought the chain in a bid to bring pizza to the masses. The arrangement didn’t work out quite as planned for either party, and the Grotes bought Donatos back in 2003. But eventually Grote found a compatible corporate partner, Red Robin, which serves Donatos pizza in more than 260 locations, helping Columbus-style pizza reach a larger audience. Donatos even recently partnered with restaurant robotics company Appetronix to open a fully automated pizza restaurant at John Glenn Columbus International Airport.

Ellison likens Donatos to the Bud Light of Columbus-style pizza. That’s not an insult. Any brewer knows “how hard it is to have a beer consistently come out exactly the same way every single time,” Ellison says. Same with pizza.

While Donatos is flourishing, Ellison worries that the traditional Columbus-style pizza is an “endangered species.” Many of the family pizzerias that opened in the ’50s and ’60s have shuttered locations or closed altogether. It’s tough to keep a family business going after the second or third generation.

But pizzerias are still opening up across the city, and Columbus is still a pizza city. It’s just evolving. Vitale points to new pizzerias that incorporate influences from around the world, echoing Columbus’s diverse population and growing culinary scene. There’s a paneer tikka masala pizza at Moon Pizza and a chicken shawarma pie at Auzy’s Pizza & Chicken. Their pies may be the ones feeding future generations of proud, Ohio State-cheering, Columbus-style pizza advocates. 

The days are getting longer, the sun’s shining, and the whisper of ramp season is starting to swirl through the wind, with the abundance of exciting spring produce fast behind it. It was an especially cold, snowy winter in New York City, and because of that, my excitement to cook also felt stuck within a snowdrift at times. That’s to say that I was more excited than usual to read spring’s slate of new cookbooks. The season’s roundup of cookbooks delivered. I was pleased to find obsessive explorations into vodka sauce and chocolate chip cookies, incredibly in-depth explanations of barbecue that’ll push anyone with a grill to up their game, delightfully moody musings on baking and early-20s life, playful tips from a popular Brooklyn chef for perking up store-bought pita, and so much more. I can say with certainty: Reading these books, I’m excited to cook again. I hope they do the same for you.

Obsessed with the Best: 100+ Methodically Perfected Recipes Based on 20+ Head-to-Head Tests
Ella Quittner

William Morrow, out now

Nobody’s doing it like Ella Quittner. Perhaps you’ve seen her visually compelling recipe tests, like an array of 32 distinct chocolate chip cookies — each following a different technique — or 25 takes on vodka sauce on rigatoni laid out with tweezered precision. Quittner, a contributor to the New York Times and an alum of Food52, where she wrote the Absolute Best Tests column, dedicates her debut to “anyone who was told they asked ‘too many questions’ in grade school.” Accordingly, the recipes in Obsessed with the Best are gleaned from her maniacal dedication to recipe testing; her dishes and desserts are rounded out by funny, incisive essays about the feverish societal chase for the “best.” This is a book for anyone who’s ever doubted the rigor behind recipe writing, or who wants validation of their own tendency to spiral into rabbit holes.

The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook: Seasonal Home Cooking from South Asia’s Best Spice Farms
Sana Javeri Kadri and Asha Loupy

Harvest, out now 

Javeri Kadri is the founder of spice company Diaspora Co., which offers spices sourced from small farms around South Asia while advocating for sustainability, fair trade, and regenerative practices. Diaspora sees its model as “complicating and deepening what ‘Made in South Asia’ means.” The brand’s official cookbook expands the Diaspora universe by putting the spotlight on the farming families behind its spices and sharing their time-honored recipes (sourced from a roster of all-women contributors, who were paid “as close to US recipe development rates as possible,” Javeri Kadri writes), in addition to lively original recipes from Loupy. It’s a beautiful, colorful cookbook that will bring a new lens to how you think about the turmeric and cumin in your pantry. Javeri Kadri describes Diaspora as coming from “a place of wild hope”; all that hope and joy is palpable here.

Will This Make You Happy: Stories & Recipes from a Year of Baking
Tanya Bush

Chronicle, out now

Tanya Bush, pastry chef at Brooklyn’s Little Egg and co-founder of Cake Zine, once cited Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book — a novel on one side, but a memoir if flipped over — as inspiration for her debut cookbook. Bush’s book has a similar fluidity: Read it as a book, or bake from it like a cookbook; choose your own adventure. It’s broken into chapters by season, which follow the pandemic year when Bush pushed through the directionless daze of her early 20s by beginning to bake professionally. These chapters are interspersed with recipes (the ever-popular Little Egg cruller is there, of course) to create what Bush calls a “narrative cookbook,” in which baking and living feel truly enmeshed. Not all of this is neat nor even aspirational: It’s an extension of Bush’s Instagram @will.this.make.me.happy, a brooding archive of baking and having feelings about it (many dishes result in a “no”). It’s a book that finds sweetness in the messiness of life, and yes, sometimes, the soul-affirming power of a little treat.

Revel: A Maximalist’s Guide to Having People Over
Mariana Velásquez

Ten Speed Press, out now

The past few years have seen a boom of hosting-themed cookbooks, as Americans once again heed the call of the house party. Amid this growing niche, Mariana Velasquez’s newest cookbook, which bills itself as “a maximalist’s guide to having people over,” still manages to stand out with its level of glamour. This is not a book for people who want to dump cheap beers into an ice-filled bathtub, but rather, those with a glassware collection; those who want to pull out exactly the right coupes in which to pour Champagne. This is a glitzy guide for the primpers and the preeners, full of lush photography, styling, and Pinterest-worthy spreads. 

Still, Velásquez’s recipes are achievable and, at times, whimsical: Consider her “deconstructed pie bar,” in which dough is shaped into chic “piecrust points,” or her omelet fit for a crowd, in which eggs are baked on a sheet and then rolled into a giant, platter-worthy roulade. We all need something to aspire to; Revel is full of ideas. 

Soomaaliya: Food, Memory, and Migration
Ifrah Ahmed

Hardie Grant, March 24

Ifrah Ahmed’s debut cookbook is a vibrant ode to Somalia, both the country and its large diaspora, which was born out of mass migration after the 1991 Somali Civil War. Ahmed, who arrived in Seattle as a refugee in 1996, takes on the daunting task of preserving history from a culture whose oral tradition for passing on stories, recipes, and culinary practices has been disrupted. Ahmed’s recipes lean into the specificity of Somali flavors, which come through even in holdovers from the Italian colonial period. Baasto, or pasta, is served with suugo, a sauce of tuna cooked with marinara sauce and xawaash, the essential Somali spice blend that features cumin, coriander, black pepper, cinnamon, green cardamom, cloves, and turmeric.

Ahmed interrogates the idea of cultural preservation on multiple levels. “Forced migration meant we clung to what was most familiar, while trauma made us need to protect and maintain what we once knew, just as we knew it,” she writes. At the same time, Ahmed, who does pop-ups as Milk & Myrrh, once became known for her Somali take on breakfast burritos: eggs and fuul wrapped in canjeero. What makes Soomaliya so exciting is not just its loving preservation, but also Ahmed’s open-minded insistence on the dynamic, evolving nature of culture.

Hello, Home Cooking: Do-Able Dishes for Every Day
Ham El-Waylly

Clarkson Potter, March 31

You can always count on Ham El-Waylly, the head chef and culinary partner at Brooklyn’s party-like seafood spot Strange Delight, to offer such a fun, joyful energy in his cooking videos that it’s actually worth a few minutes to stop scrolling. (He often appears with his wife, the recipe developer and cookbook author Sohla El-Waylly.) El-Waylly’s colorful cookbook debut radiates the same sunny, not-too-serious attitude. His first “real job” was as an ESL teacher in Doha, where he was born and raised, while he was studying to be a chemical engineer, a wild tidbit of lore that may help explain why El-Waylly has such an at-ease approach to instruction. 

Despite his background as a fine dining chef, El-Waylly’s recipes here are less restaurant, more chef’s-day-off, like store-bought pita brushed with egg whites, sprinkled with everything bagel seasoning, and baked into a crispy, golden snack. (He also turns pita into cinnamon-glazed breakfast cereal.) El-Waylly’s Egyptian, Bolivian, and Qatari background brings a clever perspective to familiar staples, like maple-glazed bacon spiced like basturma, breakfast tacos filled with “ful medames in the style of refried beans,” and shrimp toast “with the soul of lahm bi ajeen.” With ideas like these, who wouldn’t want to cook at home?

Vitamina T: Your Daily Dose of Tacos, Tortas, Tamales, and More Mexican Street Food Classics
Jorge Gaviria and Fermín Núñez with Allegra Ben-Amotz

Clarkson Potter, April 7

Should I book a flight to Mexico? That’s what I thought the instant I finished flipping through Vitamina T, a collaboration between Masienda’s Jorge Gaviria and Austin chef Fermín Núñez — of Suerte, Este, and Bar Toti — that traverses Mexico’s wide array of street food. Named for Mexico’s major street food, most of which begin with the letter “t,” the book is broken into six sections: tostadas, tortas, tacos, tamales, “todo lo demás” (everything else), and “toques finales,” final touches. It’s a playful, transportive book that feels like two friends taking you on the tastiest tour of their favorite taquerias (sorry, had to stay on theme) on a sunny day when everyone’s in a good mood; here, you’ll find images of children, construction workers, and even a nun, all beaming because of that delicious Vitamina T. 

Cake From Lucie: Recipes and Techniques from the French Countryside to New York City
Lucie Franc de Ferriere 

Clarkson Potter, April 14

One of the “it” girls of the cake zeitgeist, Lucie Franc de Ferriere makes much-imitated cakes. Inspired by her upbringing in the French countryside, her cakes are overflowing with lush florals, striking a balance between the natural and the surreal and between maximalism and restraint. Franc de Ferriere has been the face of a very 2020s phenomenon: bakers who tapped into baking during the pandemic after getting laid off, gained traction via social media, and then found such runaway success that they could build successful brick-and-mortar businesses, as with Franc de Ferriere’s hit NYC bakery From Lucie. She traces her path and details her approachable baking philosophy in the romantically photographed Cake From Lucie, offering a treat even for those who can’t visit the shop.

Eating at Home: The Nourishing Practice of Everyday Cooking
Trinity Mouzon Wofford with Rebecca Firkser 

Ten Speed Press, April 14

I love a cookbook that gets a little woo-woo about home cooking: the spiritual value of sitting down for a meal, the guiding practice of methodically chopping and stirring, the restorative nature of slowing down to cook and eat in a world that asks for efficiency, and so on. I suspected I’d found this in Eating at Home as soon as I flipped through and saw the rustic, linocut print illustrations, but I knew I had once I started reading. “I wrote this book because of what everyday cooking really feeds us with: connection,” writes Trinity Mouzon Wofford, who runs the wellness brand Golde. I like these books largely because they feel lived-in and not terribly prescriptive, accommodating the amorphous nature of being a real person who cooks every day and sometimes needs a jolt to find the glimmers in it again. 

Eating at Home is exactly this, with recipes that occasionally call for “nice to have” but not essential-to-the-dish ingredients and offers ideas for variation. Little touches give staples new life, like dashi whisked into scrambled eggs. (There’s a Japanese influence throughout: Mouzon Wofford’s husband, Issey Kobori, who did the illustrations, is Japanese.) A chapter on “Component Cooking” represents the book’s broader stance; a helpful list offers ways to make two or three of these components into a quick lunch. It’s the kind of cookbook you don’t just read as a set of steps but internalize as a kind of perspective. You’ll like this if you like Tamar Adler.

More Than Sweet: Desserts with Flavor
Marie Frank

Hardie Grant, April 14

I’m a longtime Instagram fan of the pastry chef and recipe developer Marie Frank, whose coupes of ice cream in flavors like genmaicha-roasted banana and black-sesame cocoa have such an appealing sense of unfussy chic, placed next to a window and photographed with little fuss, exuding an air of, “Oh, this little thing? I just whipped it up.” Frank’s More Than Sweet is achievable and welcoming, even for those of us who don’t have plans of getting an ice cream maker, with bakes like plum galette with Sichuan pepper, mirin-pumpkin custard tart, and jasmine-poached rhubarb. 

Frank has a knack for making simple bakes more interesting through smartly deployed, complexifying flavors; consider her blackberry-Darjeeling frangipane. It’s a baking book that’ll speak to anyone who calls themselves “not really a sweets person,” or who finds buttercream too cloying and would rather have salted mascarpone and macerated oranges any day. It shares DNA with Camilla Wynne’s Nature’s Candy and Natasha Pickowicz’s More Than Cake — ambitious books that make you look at sweets a little differently.

The Lao Kitchen: Lao Flavors and Stories Told Through Family Recipes
Saeng Douangdara

Ten Speed Press, April 21

“Lao food is not talked about enough,” Saeng Douangdara says at the start of every video in his popular social media series about Lao foodways. The personal chef and cooking instructor has made it his mission to advocate for Lao cuisine; jeow som, a sour dipping sauce made with fish sauce and lime juice that’s often eaten with steak and sticky rice, is not, as so many people have rebranded it, “crack sauce,” he clarifies. The dearth of Lao cookbooks in the American cookbook world is proof of the necessity of Douangdara’s debut, which is full of vivid imagery of street scenes, farms, and more. At the base of many dishes is padaek, an unfiltered fish sauce that Douangdara calls “the liquid gold unique to Lao cuisine.” In The Lao Kitchen, he shines an even brighter light on the bold flavors of Laos, taking them beyond “funky” alone. 

Eaterland: Recipes and Stories from Across the United States 
Eater, Sarah Zorn, and Missy Frederick

Abrams, April 28

Of course we’re excited about this one: Eater’s second cookbook, Eaterland, taps into our deep network of restaurants, chefs, and local-expert food writers nationwide for a state-spanning homage to the quirky regional dishes that form the backbone of American dining. You’ll learn about the Pacific Northwest’s salmon sinigang; we have the Filipino migrant workers of Alaska’s fish canneries in the early 20th century to thank for that. You’ll finally understand what makes up a proper Denver omelet, with a recipe from Colorado’s Sam’s No. 3, which has been in the game since 1927. You’ll get the secret for how Jerry’s Restaurant in Texas has made chicken-fried steak since the 1930s; in all that time, the recipe hasn’t changed. Eaterland is a road trip without having to get in the car (which is great, because I hate driving).

Aloha Veggies: Veg-Forward Recipes Celebrating the Flavors of Hawai‘i
Alana Kysar

Ten Speed Press, April 28

I cook primarily vegetables at home, and sometimes feel that I have exhausted every possible way to cook a vegetable that already exists in my brain. For these occasions, I welcome Alana Kysar’s newest cookbook, which applies the techniques and flavors of Hawai‘i’s mainstay dishes to vegetables, often with multiple takes on the same dish (e.g., katsu four distinctly different ways). Here, shoyu chicken — to Kysar, the mark of a good Hawaiian plate lunch spot — becomes shoyu cauliflower with chickpeas, or shoyu kabocha with green onion oil and whipped tofu. Loco moco, which features gravy and a fried egg on a burger, is applied to a tofu burger, a black bean-mushroom burger, a breadfruit-white bean burger, and a black lentil burger — there’s a lot to learn here. Hawaiian cuisine is such an interesting and delicious confluence of global influences, and while Spam and mochiko chicken get lots of attention, Kysar proves that cooking only vegetables doesn’t mean having to give up those compelling Hawaiian flavors.

New School Barbecue: Recipes for Next-Level Smoking and Grilling from Austin’s LeRoy and Lewis
Evan LeRoy and Paula Forbes

Abrams, May 12

When Eater Northeast editor Nadia Chaudhury was leaving Austin after more than 11 years of calling it home, she went to LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue for her last dinner. “I love the way that LeRoy perfects traditional barbecue, but then also pushes [the genre] beyond its typical boundaries,” she told me. Thus, it’s kind of a big deal, she says, that Evan LeRoy has now published a cookbook, a comprehensive guide to meat and smokers that he co-wrote with Texas Monthly’s Paula Forbes (an Eater alum). Let this be your guide to transformative brisket (the process of making brisket alone takes up 14 pages), Sichuan beef ribs, the famous L&L burger with “a bark as sturdy as any brisket,” and bacon ribs that “eat like a fatty, sweet, salty pork belly burnt end.” Hungry yet? Get this for the person in your life who just invested in a smoker, and hope to reap the rewards of their impending experimentation. 

Spain My Way: Eat, Drink, and Cook Like a Spaniard
José Andrés with Sam Chapple-Sokol

Ecco, May 19

José Andrés’s excitement to be in Spain exudes from the pages of Spain My Way, which brings the acclaimed chef back to the land of his birth. “It is where I learned to cook, learned to eat, and most importantly, learned to love food,” he writes. Spain My Way is a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants a one-stop shop for not only getting into Spanish cooking but also thinking about it creatively. While, yes, you can expect a classic tortilla de patatas recipe here, you’ll also find a tortilla vaga, or “lazy tortilla” that’s cooked on just one side, two ways: topped with potato chips, piparra peppers, and slices of cured morcilla in the style of Madrid chef Sacha Hormaechea; or topped with potato chips, creme fraiche, and caviar in Andrés’s own way. Memories of and reflections on Andrés’s career appear in essays throughout the book. And despite the aforementioned caviar, the recipes are highly accessible, as long as you have a solid purveyor of tinned fish, cured meat, and manchego.

The One White Street cheeseburger went viral last summer with many people calling it the best burger in New York City. The fast-food-style burger seems simple — two thin patties are stacked between a sesame bun with sauce and onions — but every high-quality ingredient is meticulously made in the Tribeca restaurant’s zero-waste kitchen. The meat for the burger is ground in-house, using multiple cuts of wagyu beef, and is perfectly portioned in a patty press. Executive chef Galen Kennemer recommends pairing the order with the fried potatoes, which are tossed in powdered chili pulp and served with Sriracha sauce.

But there’s more than just a fantastic burger at the Michelin-Green-starred restaurant, one of only a few honored spots in the city. Kennemer explains that One White Street is committed to a farm-to-table ethos, literally operating its own farm upstate, Rigger Hill Farms, and building a menu around what produce is in season.

In the kitchen, Kennemer sears huge halves of cabbage until they are blackened. “Over the last several years, I think that burnt has become an actual flavor to use,” he says. “Charred is in.” Those cabbages are put through a juicer to make the sauce for a flavorful lamb dish. For the same dish, lamb necks from Colorado are cured for two days in salt, brown sugar, and black peppercorns, before being smoked at a low temperature and slowly cooked down in the burnt cabbage juice. Pickles, made from the farm’s vegetables, and fresh flatbread are served with the smoky lamb neck, so diners can build their own gyros at the table.

For other dishes, whole ducks from the Hudson Valley are butchered and then dry-aged for two weeks before being integrated into many dishes, including a confit duck leg and beans entree inspired by French cassoulet. The fresh beans are soaked, slow simmered with aromatics, and prepped to be cooked down for service.

“Trying to eat local, eat seasonal, support small farmers, [and] trying not to waste stuff,” is the central message of the kitchen says Kennemer. “I think that is just a great approach to making our food culture stronger, better, and hopefully more longevity with having good food.”

Watch the latest episode of Experts to see how One White Street integrates sustainable practices into a kitchen churning out show-stopping lamb necks, comforting duck dishes, and a stellar burger.

Eater’s newest cookbook, Eaterland: Recipes and Stories From Across the United States, is now available for preorder. With a focus on the iconic regional dishes that define American cuisine, the cookbook is chock-full of recipes, observations from chefs, and essays about unique local ingredients and traditions.

At Eater, we’ve found ourselves repeatedly drawn to hyper-regional dishes — from Texas’s beloved Frito pie to the french fry-topped Pittsburgh salad. These dishes, beloved to those in-the-know, and the local chefs who champion them, usually find their way onto the maps and guides we’re known for. But devouring a bowl of Hawaiian loco moco as exceptional as the one from Koko Head Cafe in Honolulu (page 264) while living in the Northeast isn’t exactly easy. With Eaterland, readers can recreate those flavors right at home. 

The book is organized geographically, with eight chapters covering different regions of the United States, including Alaska, Hawai‘i, and Puerto Rico, each written by an experienced local food writer well-versed in the nuances of their area of the country. It includes quotes and stories from local chefs like New York’s Kwame Onwuachi and Texas’s Dean Fearing, sharing details about what makes their hometowns special. 

Every chapter features recipes for dishes crucial to the region’s history — many from small restaurants integral to the local community. In essays and interviews, Eater explores the evolution of these microcuisines, from the Indigenous roots of Southwestern fare to the Korean, Mexican, and Filipino touches that play a role in Californian and Pacific Northwest cuisine.

Eaterland’s foreword is written by Eater editorial director Missy Frederick and Eater editor-in-chief Stephanie Wu. The book was edited by Frederick, along with prominent cookbook author and editor Sarah Zorn. Contributors to Eaterland include: Asonta Benetti, Stephanie Jane Carter, Amy Cavanaugh, Martha Cheng, Tim Ebner, Julia O’Malley, Mahira Rivers, Taylor Tobin, and Naomi Tomky. Recipes were tested by Jonathan

Melendez. Eaterland features photography by Matt Taylor-Gross, with food styling by Brett Regot, prop styling by Brooke Deonarine, and illustrations by Yoko Baum. 

Eaterland will be released on April 28. Preorder here. Use code EATERBOOKS40 for 40% off.

If you see a parade of diners in Kangol flat caps at Bubby’s this week, don’t be too surprised: It’s all part of the renewed interest in the late John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, thanks to Love Story, the new Hulu/FX capsule series about the famous (and at times, infamous) couple. 

The show has set a record as FX’s most-watched limited series ever, clocking over 25 million viewing hours. Folks have been especially transfixed by the ultra ’90s-cool aesthetics and world-building — the Calvin Klein neutrals, Noguchi lamps, and Tribeca lofts. Showrunner Ryan Murphy, for all of the controversy surrounding the show, has certainly committed to period accuracy. Curbed published a deep dive on the painstakingly sourced Wassily chairs and Joseph D’Urso flourishes, and according to luxury resale platform the RealReal, searches for Calvin Klein also spiked 139 percent in the 12 days following the first episode’s release. 

Fans in New York City who are hungry for even more immersion have also started going to the restaurants and bars featured in the show and other spots that are seminal to JFK Jr. and CBK lore. Bubby’s was a known go-to spot for the couple, who were often photographed by the Tribeca restaurant (it was just up the block from their former penthouse apartment, and JFK Jr. apparently loved the pancakes). Bubby’s tells Eater, “It was a fun moment to see the restaurant featured in the show. The buzz has been great, and we’ve loved welcoming both regulars and new guests who stop by after seeing it.” As a bartender at Walker’s bar and restaurant (just next door) also told Eater, there has also been an influx of fans who either clocked the bar from the show or came to see the apartment facade. 

The Odeon was also featured on the show, although a representative of the iconic brasserie told me that it normally “witnesses substantial sales increases [around] Valentine’s Day” (the day the show also premiered), making it “challenging to accurately measure the impact.” Michael’s New York was featured in a scene with the character of John F. Kennedy, and general manager Steve Millington tells Eater that the increase in traffic has been not only noticeable, but sentimental. “As someone who used to know John and see him here often, it’s been wonderful,” he explained, adding that the space represents a specific moment in time for the New York City dining scene. “For the fans of the show,” he says, “it’s a place where history comes to hang its hat.”

Then there’s Panna II, the string-light-laden Indian restaurant prominently featured in the show as the spot of the couple’s fictionalized first date. Apparently, JFK Jr. and CBK were frequent diners there in the ’90s, and owner Boshir Khan told me the restaurant has been receiving nearly double the reservations per night since the show premiered — a welcome boost, he adds, during a particularly rough New York City winter. “Normally we would get around 20, or 22 [reservations] a night. Now it’s around 40.”

The glow seems to mostly be impacting the restaurants with screen time: Mudville, another Tribeca bar and restaurant that was a known favorite of the couple, has not been featured on the show and told me that they “have not seen any change in bookings or traffic compared to last year.” 

At the time of their much-papped courtship, JFK Jr. and CBK set the tone of ’90s nonchalance that has now crystallized as the image of a bygone, more intriguingly offline New York City — no smartphones, no complicated reservation platforms, just riding a bike to a Lower East Side Indian restaurant or pulling up to Odeon in your calfskin boots and Aldo shades. “This show somehow captured the spirit of the ’90s — a feeling many of us who lived through that decade haven’t experienced in years,” a fan of the show wrote on Reddit; another user chimed in, “I was going to say that. The late-90s to 2001, prior to 9/11, have such a specific feeling and vibe.” As author and former friend of the couple, Carole Radziwill (the widow of JFK Jr.’s cousin Anthony Radziwill), explained on a podcast about the breezy but intentional NYC restaurant culture of the ’90s, “There was no canceling. Sometimes you could call the number of the restaurant [and] speak to the maitre d’ … there was an ease to it. You also had neighborhood restaurants. You could just walk in.” Reservation culture, she adds, has “taken a bit of the spark out of what New York nightlife should be, which is a little bit more spontaneous. Even the restaurants that aren’t private clubs run like private clubs.” 

Love Story, however, offers viewers — and now, diners — a seat at the table. 

Eater Today is a daily newsletter about dining by and for people with good taste. I’m Bettina Makalintal, a senior reporter at Eater and the lead writer of this newsletter, though you’ll also find cameos from other members of the Eater team. I’m based in New York City but report on food culture nationwide, and with the help of my colleagues across the country, I’ll keep you posted on the latest trends and shifts in dining culture at large, whether it’s the global rise of salt bread or British food’s modern redemption arc.

 Here’s what to expect: 

• Fresh dispatches in your inbox every weekday, with dining recommendations and observations from across the country, and the meals our highly opinionated editors can’t stop thinking about. 
• Trend explainers, like why restaurant owners are suddenly so focused on chicken-centric concepts and why others are going all in on the “nostalgic tavern” aesthetic. 
• Interviews with food-world legends like Alice Waters and Padma Lakshmi.  
• And every Friday, a round-up of the biggest food news — and why it matters. 

Stick with us so you can have some talking points for your next dinner party or assume the role of table captain at the natural wine bar with small plates (every friend group needs one, after all).

Just enter your email address, or click here, if you can’t see the sign-up form above.

By subscribing, you are agreeing to receive the selected newsletter from Eater, as well as occasional messages from sponsors and/or partners of Eater.

Eater Today is a daily newsletter about dining by and for people with good taste. I’m Bettina Makalintal, a senior reporter at Eater and the lead writer of this newsletter, though you’ll also find cameos from other members of the Eater team. I’m based in New York City but report on food culture nationwide, and with the help of my colleagues across the country, I’ll keep you posted on the latest trends and shifts in dining culture at large, whether it’s the global rise of salt bread or British food’s modern redemption arc.

 Here’s what to expect: 

• Fresh dispatches in your inbox every weekday, with dining recommendations and observations from across the country, and the meals our highly opinionated editors can’t stop thinking about. 
• Trend explainers, like why restaurant owners are suddenly so focused on chicken-centric concepts and why others are going all in on the “nostalgic tavern” aesthetic. 
• Interviews with food-world legends like Alice Waters and Padma Lakshmi.  
• And every Friday, a round-up of the biggest food news — and why it matters. 

Stick with us so you can have some talking points for your next dinner party or assume the role of table captain at the natural wine bar with small plates (every friend group needs one, after all).

Just enter your email address, or click here, if you can’t see the sign-up form above.

By subscribing, you are agreeing to receive the selected newsletter from Eater, as well as occasional messages from sponsors and/or partners of Eater.

Fish and chips is a once-a-week special at the Ojai, California, restaurant Rory’s Place. The nostalgic dish — which the owners, siblings Maeve and Rory McAuliffe, grew up eating during family trips to Cape Cod — is served only on Wednesdays. Rory’s Place is also laser-focused on sustainability, serving fresh local produce, seafood, and meat, and giving back to the local farmland by composting and donating scraps.

Head chef Maeve McAuliffe breaks down massive fresh halibut, sustainably sourced from the nearby Ventura coastline, for the weekly fish and chips special. The carcass of the fish is saved to make a fumet, fish stock laden with aromatics. A beer batter is whipped up just before service, to give the fried fish a delicate crunch, which McAuliffe calls an “effervescent pancake mix.” For the dish, two massive pieces of halibut are served on top of fresh fries, that have already gone through a two-day process of blanching before being dipped in the fryer, alongside housemade tartar sauce.

The sisters try to keep their sourcing as local as possible, working with farmers, seafood purveyors, and ranchers in the area. Every vegetable scrap is composted at nearby farms and ranches, creating a “closed loop nutrient cycle” that Maeve McAuliffe says creates healthy soil and future nutrient-dense vegetables. She showcases those fresh vegetables in a roasted cabbage dish, made by slow-roasting a huge slice of the dense vegetable in a wood-fire oven before plating it with a silky pumpkin sauce and winter herbs.

Shellfish and uni sourced from the nearby Channel Islands and Santa Barbara coast are also showcased on the menu, including three different types of oysters (they sell about 2,000 oysters each week), but the most popular dish at Rory’s Place is hanger steaks from Kansas City served with a French roasted-onion sauce, called a soubise. Even the steak scraps are given to a local rancher that will feed them to his pigs and use them in compost.

“Food can taste great and be exciting, unexpected, and delicious and be really good for you,” Maeve McAuliffe says, explaining that customers aren’t just enjoying delicious meals when they dine at Rory’s Place, but are supporting their commitment to ethical ingredients and sustainable practices.

Watch the latest episode of Experts to see how some of the most beloved dishes at Rory’s Place are prepared, including a weekly fish and chips special, charred cabbage, and hanger steak.

There are a handful of routes connecting the Bay Area and Los Angeles, each offering wildly different options in terms of natural beauty and amenities for travelers. You can spend a long day (or a leisurely weekend) winding down Highway 1, stopping along the way at a handful of charming seaside enclaves, each with its own culinary destinations. Or prioritize a quicker drive and take Interstate 5, the flat, often boring four-lane expanse that runs straight through California’s agricultural heartland. 

But with a little planning, it’s possible to eat well while traveling through the center of the state as well as on the periphery. Here’s a guide to the best stops along Highway 1 and Interstate 5, including a beachside oyster stand in Ventura, a destination for Indian food in Bakersfield, and a charming all-day cafe in the seaside enclave of Carmel.

Additional reporting by Greg Morabito.