“The people who pick up flyers and show up to free classes tend to be restless searchers,” John tells his students, after remarking that there must be something wrong with them if they’re here. When one student takes offense, John assures her he means this as a compliment. This scene takes place early on in Nick Drnaso’s unsettling new graphic novel, Acting Class. What starts out as a low-key portrait of a group of ordinary unsatisfied people trying something new winds up a sometimes sinister but always philosophical meditation on the quest for deeper meaning.

Acting Class by Nick Drnaso Drawn & Quarterly, hardcover $29.95, 248 pp., drawnandquarterly.com. Drnaso appears Wed 10/26 7 PM with Ling Ma (Bliss Montage) at Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, womenandchildrenfirst.com.

Drnaso nimbly sketches in the lives of the acting class participants before they each see the flyer and make the fateful decision to see what it’s all about. A longtime couple tries to reignite their faltering relationship by playacting dinner as strangers. A man bakes cookies for his coworkers that they’re afraid to try because none trust him. Another must fundraise door-to-door as community service for an unrevealed crime while fighting his cripplingly negative inner monologue. A grandmother worries so much about her mentally fragile granddaughter that her care may be doing more harm than good. A single mother pours all her own problems out to a son who’s too young to understand and may later be crippled by her lack of boundaries. “Just don’t turn on me the way I had to turn on my parents. This situation will be totally different,” she begs as she rocks him to sleep. She must know it isn’t different, that whatever flaws she inherited keep getting passed down generation to generation.

As the teacher said, each of these people is looking for something. The question, which Drnaso wisely keeps close to his chest, is what they’re actually getting in this generic institutional basement. On the face of it, these strangers gather in a community center in the evening to try out some acting exercises. It’s a thing to do with your free time instead of watching TV, a way to be creative, to be engaged. None in this group comes off as aspiring thespians. This is not a first step to their new career on stage or screen. It’s more like therapy: an attempt to look deeper into themselves.

Drnaso’s drawing style is somewhere between Mike Judge’s King of the Hill and those airplane evacuation card graphics. His people are lumpy with small, barely rendered features. There were many times while reading the book that I got mixed up about which character was being depicted. But this isn’t a criticism. By leaving them half-realized and vague, his heroes become universal and also easily relatable to a variety of readers. They’re like unfinished costumes anyone could slip into. The acting exercises do nothing to lessen the characters’ interchangeability.

“It may seem like we’re moving unreasonably fast, but I don’t believe in building up all this suspense around performing. I’ve found it’s best to jump in awkwardly and work it out as we go. And again, it doesn’t matter, and yet it does, but it doesn’t, if that makes sense.”

To explain his approach, John says he’s trying to break down his students’ barriers and inhibitions. But to what end? Clearly their lives are not going so well that they couldn’t use a change. As one man remarks to a new trainee at his job, which involves mindlessly personalizing dolls and other souvenirs with names written in a variety of fonts, “I learned a long time ago not to hang too much self-esteem on a job.” What John offers instead of the drudgery of their everyday lives is a kind of mindfuck that takes on cultic overtones. Each week’s class seems to take in a different location and doesn’t conform to any set format.

As the book goes on, the line between everyday life and make-believe blurs, then vanishes. For some in the class, this is a dream come true. They like the characters they’ve invented much more than the personalities they’ve been saddled with up till then. For others, it’s a nightmare they’re increasingly desperate to escape. The gap between polar-opposite perceptions of the same event will be familiar to anyone engaged in the online world. 

The ending may be a bit too Twilight Zone for its own good in being weird for the sake of weird but if I ever see a flyer for a free acting class, I will run the other way. I might even tear it off the wall and throw it in the trash as a public service. Some doors are best left unopened.

Read More

On September 24, Toolbox @ Twenty opens at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) to celebrate the Seldoms’ 20th anniversary with an exhibition and performances in a large-scale experiment in collaboration among dancers, visual artists, and the alternative visual arts exhibition space. Curated by the Seldoms’ founding artistic/executive director Carrie Hanson in collaboration with HPAC director of exhibitions and residency Allison Peters Quinn, Toolbox @ Twenty pairs Hanson with multidisciplinary artist Edra Soto, Damon Green with sound artist Sadie Woods, Maggie Vannucci with painter Jackie Kazarian, and Sarah Gonsiorowski with fiber artist Jacqueline Surdell to create new works. Over the course of six weeks, the Seldoms will offer six free live performances, followed by conversations with the artists. 

Toolbox @ Twenty9/24-11/13: Mon-Thu 10 AM-7 PM, Fri 10 AM-4:30 PM, Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Sun 10 AM-1:30 PM; performances Sat 9/24 1:30 and 3 PM, Thu 10/6, 10/20, and 11/3 6 PM, Sat 10/15 1 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520, hydeparkart.org, theseldoms.org, free

The Seldoms was founded in 2001 by Hanson, choreographer Susan Hoffman, and visual and performance artist Doug Stapleton. “The Seldoms name, we found it in a book of photography about bodies,” recalls Hanson. “The original Seldoms did tableau vivant-style performance in the 1800s in London—we just liked the name.” Under Hanson’s direction after the first two years, the Seldoms has retained an interdisciplinary focus, occasionally still in collaboration with Stapleton, who helped facilitate the first Toolbox, which launched in Glasgow in 2017. 

Visual art is “in the DNA of what we do,” says Hanson. “It’s not usually the starting point, but we’ve always paid attention to set design and to the extension of the idea through video and animation. One of my favorite projects, Marchland [2010], came out of working with artist Fraser Taylor. He’s in Glasgow now, but taught at SAIC. He collaborated with a video artist and made marks directly onto film. I responded to Fraser’s piece and his practice of markmaking. Bob Faust has worked with us on just about every project since Power Goes [2014]. For Rockcitizen [2016], my piece about the 1960s, I was thinking I wanted something psychedelic that changes form and shape-shifts. He started thinking about stretchy materials, and he was like, ‘What about bras?’ So we had somebody sew together 208 bras to create what he called ‘the brascape!’”

Hanson turned to Toolbox as a means to reinvigorate her own creative process. “I’d already been choreographing a long time, feeling stale and knowing that I work with a formula,” she says. “So what can we do to disrupt that?” She developed a method that starts with a conversation about process with a visual artist. Together, they decide on a single word, usually a verb, to describe the process. Using this word as a “tool” or prompt, the dancemaker then creates new movement. 

“The outcome is less important than the dialogue,” says Hanson, who has taught the method in her composition courses at Columbia College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the students expanded the process to include any kind of practitioner. “One of my students interviewed a PhD student in ethnomusicology who was in Mongolia working with sheepherders. The sheepherders sing to their sheep. So this got translated into something the dancers could do together: people are paired up, one is vocalizing or generating sound, knocking your fist against the floor, snapping, rubbing your hand on your knee or whatever, and the person listening is improvising and moving. It gets you thinking in a different way.”

While primarily used to spark new ways of devising movement, the tools they have found sometimes find their way into finished choreography for the Seldoms. “We’ve used ‘lift’ quite often,” says Hanson. “‘Lift’ came from Fraser Taylor. He does prints: he paints a surface, then puts down a piece of paper and presses it, then lifts it off the plate. You can do multiple prints, and the paint becomes lighter and lighter. A lift—in our translation—you have to do two things: you have to reverse it (if the ‘plate’ starts on the right side of the body, you do it on the left side), and you do it repeated times—and every time you do it, it diminishes a little bit. In a way, some of these tools have quite strict rules to them! 

“When we first started this in Glasgow with five artists, trying to translate, it was very heady. I was not only wanting to invigorate my practice but also thinking about evidence. I’m guilty about it like anyone else. But when the choreographer says, ‘This dance is about this,’ and you’re looking at it, like, ‘I don’t see that. I see you’ve given it a title, a costume, some sound elements, all these supporting things that tell me more that it’s about the topic, but I don’t see it in the movement.’ I want to push movement to be as explicit and carry as much content as it can, so the choreographers aren’t always relying on spoken word or set or surrounding environment to give the movement meaning.”

For Toolbox @ Twenty, Hanson worked with Quinn to select the four visual artists, three of whom have collaborated with the Seldoms in the past and all of whom have exhibited work at HPAC. “I had been to the first collaboration with Fraser Taylor, an artist we showed in the past,” says Quinn. “I remember being blown away that the dancers integrated the artist’s work into their movements. I was interested in how that process worked. It felt like a new way to think about creative collaboration where both people have agency. [In Toolbox], the dancers are not responding directly to the work you’re seeing; they’re responding to the gestures and process of the artist. The first time dancers will see the work is next week when they do a rehearsal in the space for the performance. It’s crazy but so exciting!”

Toolbox has also created an opportunity for HPAC to reconceive curation, their exhibition space, and the parameters of collaboration. “With this project we’ve made it so there’s a generous amount of room in the gallery to make room for bodies and to make distinct shifts between the pieces,” says Quinn. “This is not a group show where we’re talking about a theme or something consistent in everybody’s work—everybody’s work is so different!”

Looking back on 20 years of the Seldoms, Hanson says, “I feel both fortunate and responsible for this house that I’ve built, where people can come in and assemble, and we invite different people in at different times to spend some time. I like that our creative processes are a year or two years. I feel good that the ensemble members, even those who have left, have been like a family. I feel loyal when I find collaborators that I want to work with. I feel this combination of fortune, responsibility, and gratitude. It really is about collaboration. It’s about these other artists I’ve been lucky to work with.”

Read More

This time it’s for real: the sweet narcotic haze of smoked meat will haunt the streets and alleys of Irving Park. That’s when Odesza, Charles Wong’s candy apple-red, 22-foot, 500-gallon mobile road pit, will pull up at the corner of Kedzie and Belle Plaine for Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly guest chef pop-up at the Kedzie Inn.

It’s the return of Odesza’s keeper, the peripatetic new-school, Asian barbecue pop-up Umamicue, aka Wong, the hardest working pitmaster in Chicago showbiz. Wong’s shown up for many a Foodball, helping out his comrades even when he wasn’t headlining. This week a rogues’ gallery of five chefs has his back, each one harnessing Odesza’s smoky mojo in the service of a dish of their own. It’s a combined prix fixe platter that will shatter your assumptions about what barbecue is and shall ever be.

Artist’s rendering. Credit: Charles Wong

Central Texas brewery barbecue ronins Heffer BBQ will preview their December guest residency at Kimski with a smoky chicken thigh tostada, with pinto chipotle salsa, pickled red onion, and queso fresco. Mike Shaker, aka Shaker BBQ, is a Texas apostle himself, bringing in a peppery prime beef brisket and jalapeno-cheddar beef-pork sausage duo. Returning Foodball heroes SuperHai are throwing some cabbage on the grates for yakisoba with honey-miso poached shrimp, shiitakes, tamago, and Kewpie; while another illustrious MNF OG, Thattu, returns with a Keralan-style smoked bean curry.

I might be most stoked for Wong’s tea-smoked duck breast bao, a collaboration with yet another Kedzie vet, Annie Xiang of Volition Tea, who will post up in the bar with a pair of cold brews for sale, along with her exquisite dried teas.  

The mad rush for limited walk-in orders begins at 5:30 PM this Monday, September 19, but you can secure your preorders for this barbecue supergroup right now.

Meanwhile, gaze upon Monday Night Foodball’s fall schedule in progress. More dates to come.

9/26: Chicken and waffle night with Avrom Farm

10/3: Pasta night with Tony Quartaro of Gemma Foods

10/10: Night of the Copi (the invasive species formerly known as Asian carp) with Chả Cá Nuggs

10/17: Traditional Jewish deli with a modern purpose with Schneider Provisions

10/24: Sausage party with the Hot Dog Box

10/31: Halloween bye night

11/7: plant-focused taqueria pop-up Piñatta 

11/14: TBA

11/21: TBA

11/28: Thanksgiving break

12/5: TBA

12/12: Kimski rumspringa with Won Kim

12/19: First night of Hanukkah with Zeitlin’s Delicatessen and Schneider Provisions

Kedzie Inn4100 N. Kedzie(773) 293-6368kedzieinn.com

Read More

Compared to last year, this autumn yields a relatively smaller harvest of books by Chicago chefs and food writers; there aren’t as many aspiring authors cooped up in quarantine, I suppose. But by any standards, four titles dropping over the next four weeks—by a quartet of heavy hitters—offer plenty of projects for the cold weather kitchen-bound.

Justice of the Pies, Maya-Camille Broussard 

I don’t know if there’s ever been a sweeter cookbook published in Chicago history than social justice piepreneur Broussard’s debut. It’s as much a tribute to her late father—a self-proclaimed “pie master”—as it is to local food icons. Both serve as inspirations for the endlessly inventive chef, who creates pies (sweet, savory, and whoopie), tarts, and fetching miscellanea informed by everything from pizza puffs, to Italian beef, to Chicago hot dogs, to the lentil soup at the Nile, the churros at Xoco, and the carrot cake at Lawrence’s Fish and Shrimp. The pies are gorgeous and alluring, and include a collection inspired by activists Broussard admires and profiles at length. But stick to the headnotes alone and a bittersweet portrait of a loving but complicated father-daughter relationship emerges. (Clarkson Potter, October 18)

Dine in Palestine, Heifa Odeh

In 2019 the blogger behind Fufu’s Kitchen got a nod from Saveur magazine (“best food culture blog”), and now here’s the print expression of Odeh’s command of the breadth of traditional Palestinian cooking (“layered” fattet hummus; freekeh-stuffed chicken, olive oil-preserved labneh) and creative flexes (za’atar cake with olives and halloumi, chocolate almond baklava, fudgy pomegranate brownies with tahini). If, unlike Odeh, you don’t live in a paradise of Middle Eastern grocery stores such as Chicago, you might appreciate a glossary and online sources for some of the more uncommon ingredients. Not everyone can stroll down South Harlem Avenue and price sahlep powder for their homemade ice cream. But that’s what search engines are for. (Page Street, September 13)

Listen to Your Vegetables, Sarah Grueneberg and Kate Heddings

The Monteverde chef and Top Chef runner-up is best known for pasta supremacy, so this encyclopedic 432-page collection (from artichoke to tomato) is a glorious surprise—even if it comes at the end of the growing season. Grueneberg is trained in the Italian aesthetic of simplicity and superior product, but even with that the variety contained within is exhaustive and a mine of useful tips and techniques (ex: don’t oil your vegetables before grilling). You probably don’t think you need eight asparagus recipes, but flip through them and you’ll see that you do. Bonus points for the unwritten assumption (Chapter 11) that pasta is a vegetable. (Harvest, October 25)

Bread Head: Baking for the Road Less Traveled, Greg Wade and Rachel Holtzman

If (like me) you have a visceral distaste for the Grateful Dead, you might not want to give this a chance. Much like an endless Jerry jam, the Publican Quality Bread head baker’s Dead references are . . . gratuitous. But press on. Arising from the sourdough pandemic, Wade’s approach to bread and pastry is, at its core, clear, precise, and beginner-friendly, even when he wades into the weeds. A staunch advocate for local and sustainably grown grains, Wade makes even the most challenging projects (maple rye kouign amann, anyone?) seem like achievable—if long-term—goals. If you’re even a casual restaurant goer, you’ve probably eaten Wade’s bread, and if you have no intention of mastering his signature multigrain sourdough, Bread Head serves as engrossing liner notes to what you might find on the shelves any given day at PQB’s marvelous new West Town retail bakery. (Norton, September 27)

Read More

On September 24, Toolbox @ Twenty opens at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) to celebrate the Seldoms’ 20th anniversary with an exhibition and performances in a large-scale experiment in collaboration among dancers, visual artists, and the alternative visual arts exhibition space. Curated by the Seldoms’ founding artistic/executive director Carrie Hanson in collaboration with HPAC director of exhibitions and residency Allison Peters Quinn, Toolbox @ Twenty pairs Hanson with multidisciplinary artist Edra Soto, Damon Green with sound artist Sadie Woods, Maggie Vannucci with painter Jackie Kazarian, and Sarah Gonsiorowski with fiber artist Jacqueline Surdell to create new works. Over the course of six weeks, the Seldoms will offer six free live performances, followed by conversations with the artists. 

Toolbox @ Twenty9/24-11/13: Mon-Thu 10 AM-7 PM, Fri 10 AM-4:30 PM, Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Sun 10 AM-1:30 PM; performances Sat 9/24 1:30 and 3 PM, Thu 10/6, 10/20, and 11/3 6 PM, Sat 10/15 1 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520, hydeparkart.org, theseldoms.org, free

The Seldoms was founded in 2001 by Hanson, choreographer Susan Hoffman, and visual and performance artist Doug Stapleton. “The Seldoms name, we found it in a book of photography about bodies,” recalls Hanson. “The original Seldoms did tableau vivant-style performance in the 1800s in London—we just liked the name.” Under Hanson’s direction after the first two years, the Seldoms has retained an interdisciplinary focus, occasionally still in collaboration with Stapleton, who helped facilitate the first Toolbox, which launched in Glasgow in 2017. 

Visual art is “in the DNA of what we do,” says Hanson. “It’s not usually the starting point, but we’ve always paid attention to set design and to the extension of the idea through video and animation. One of my favorite projects, Marchland [2010], came out of working with artist Fraser Taylor. He’s in Glasgow now, but taught at SAIC. He collaborated with a video artist and made marks directly onto film. I responded to Fraser’s piece and his practice of markmaking. Bob Faust has worked with us on just about every project since Power Goes [2014]. For Rockcitizen [2016], my piece about the 1960s, I was thinking I wanted something psychedelic that changes form and shape-shifts. He started thinking about stretchy materials, and he was like, ‘What about bras?’ So we had somebody sew together 208 bras to create what he called ‘the brascape!’”

Hanson turned to Toolbox as a means to reinvigorate her own creative process. “I’d already been choreographing a long time, feeling stale and knowing that I work with a formula,” she says. “So what can we do to disrupt that?” She developed a method that starts with a conversation about process with a visual artist. Together, they decide on a single word, usually a verb, to describe the process. Using this word as a “tool” or prompt, the dancemaker then creates new movement. 

“The outcome is less important than the dialogue,” says Hanson, who has taught the method in her composition courses at Columbia College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the students expanded the process to include any kind of practitioner. “One of my students interviewed a PhD student in ethnomusicology who was in Mongolia working with sheepherders. The sheepherders sing to their sheep. So this got translated into something the dancers could do together: people are paired up, one is vocalizing or generating sound, knocking your fist against the floor, snapping, rubbing your hand on your knee or whatever, and the person listening is improvising and moving. It gets you thinking in a different way.”

While primarily used to spark new ways of devising movement, the tools they have found sometimes find their way into finished choreography for the Seldoms. “We’ve used ‘lift’ quite often,” says Hanson. “‘Lift’ came from Fraser Taylor. He does prints: he paints a surface, then puts down a piece of paper and presses it, then lifts it off the plate. You can do multiple prints, and the paint becomes lighter and lighter. A lift—in our translation—you have to do two things: you have to reverse it (if the ‘plate’ starts on the right side of the body, you do it on the left side), and you do it repeated times—and every time you do it, it diminishes a little bit. In a way, some of these tools have quite strict rules to them! 

“When we first started this in Glasgow with five artists, trying to translate, it was very heady. I was not only wanting to invigorate my practice but also thinking about evidence. I’m guilty about it like anyone else. But when the choreographer says, ‘This dance is about this,’ and you’re looking at it, like, ‘I don’t see that. I see you’ve given it a title, a costume, some sound elements, all these supporting things that tell me more that it’s about the topic, but I don’t see it in the movement.’ I want to push movement to be as explicit and carry as much content as it can, so the choreographers aren’t always relying on spoken word or set or surrounding environment to give the movement meaning.”

For Toolbox @ Twenty, Hanson worked with Quinn to select the four visual artists, three of whom have collaborated with the Seldoms in the past and all of whom have exhibited work at HPAC. “I had been to the first collaboration with Fraser Taylor, an artist we showed in the past,” says Quinn. “I remember being blown away that the dancers integrated the artist’s work into their movements. I was interested in how that process worked. It felt like a new way to think about creative collaboration where both people have agency. [In Toolbox], the dancers are not responding directly to the work you’re seeing; they’re responding to the gestures and process of the artist. The first time dancers will see the work is next week when they do a rehearsal in the space for the performance. It’s crazy but so exciting!”

Toolbox has also created an opportunity for HPAC to reconceive curation, their exhibition space, and the parameters of collaboration. “With this project we’ve made it so there’s a generous amount of room in the gallery to make room for bodies and to make distinct shifts between the pieces,” says Quinn. “This is not a group show where we’re talking about a theme or something consistent in everybody’s work—everybody’s work is so different!”

Looking back on 20 years of the Seldoms, Hanson says, “I feel both fortunate and responsible for this house that I’ve built, where people can come in and assemble, and we invite different people in at different times to spend some time. I like that our creative processes are a year or two years. I feel good that the ensemble members, even those who have left, have been like a family. I feel loyal when I find collaborators that I want to work with. I feel this combination of fortune, responsibility, and gratitude. It really is about collaboration. It’s about these other artists I’ve been lucky to work with.”

Read More

This time it’s for real: the sweet narcotic haze of smoked meat will haunt the streets and alleys of Irving Park. That’s when Odesza, Charles Wong’s candy apple-red, 22-foot, 500-gallon mobile road pit, will pull up at the corner of Kedzie and Belle Plaine for Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly guest chef pop-up at the Kedzie Inn.

It’s the return of Odesza’s keeper, the peripatetic new-school, Asian barbecue pop-up Umamicue, aka Wong, the hardest working pitmaster in Chicago showbiz. Wong’s shown up for many a Foodball, helping out his comrades even when he wasn’t headlining. This week a rogues’ gallery of five chefs has his back, each one harnessing Odesza’s smoky mojo in the service of a dish of their own. It’s a combined prix fixe platter that will shatter your assumptions about what barbecue is and shall ever be.

Artist’s rendering. Credit: Charles Wong

Central Texas brewery barbecue ronins Heffer BBQ will preview their December guest residency at Kimski with a smoky chicken thigh tostada, with pinto chipotle salsa, pickled red onion, and queso fresco. Mike Shaker, aka Shaker BBQ, is a Texas apostle himself, bringing in a peppery prime beef brisket and jalapeno-cheddar beef-pork sausage duo. Returning Foodball heroes SuperHai are throwing some cabbage on the grates for yakisoba with honey-miso poached shrimp, shiitakes, tamago, and Kewpie; while another illustrious MNF OG, Thattu, returns with a Keralan-style smoked bean curry.

I might be most stoked for Wong’s tea-smoked duck breast bao, a collaboration with yet another Kedzie vet, Annie Xiang of Volition Tea, who will post up in the bar with a pair of cold brews for sale, along with her exquisite dried teas.  

The mad rush for limited walk-in orders begins at 5:30 PM this Monday, September 19, but you can secure your preorders for this barbecue supergroup right now.

Meanwhile, gaze upon Monday Night Foodball’s fall schedule in progress. More dates to come.

9/26: Chicken and waffle night with Avrom Farm

10/3: Pasta night with Tony Quartaro of Gemma Foods

10/10: Night of the Copi (the invasive species formerly known as Asian carp) with Chả Cá Nuggs

10/17: Traditional Jewish deli with a modern purpose with Schneider Provisions

10/24: Sausage party with the Hot Dog Box

10/31: Halloween bye night

11/7: plant-focused taqueria pop-up Piñatta 

11/14: TBA

11/21: TBA

11/28: Thanksgiving break

12/5: TBA

12/12: Kimski rumspringa with Won Kim

12/19: First night of Hanukkah with Zeitlin’s Delicatessen and Schneider Provisions

Kedzie Inn4100 N. Kedzie(773) 293-6368kedzieinn.com

Read More

Compared to last year, this autumn yields a relatively smaller harvest of books by Chicago chefs and food writers; there aren’t as many aspiring authors cooped up in quarantine, I suppose. But by any standards, four titles dropping over the next four weeks—by a quartet of heavy hitters—offer plenty of projects for the cold weather kitchen-bound.

Justice of the Pies, Maya-Camille Broussard 

I don’t know if there’s ever been a sweeter cookbook published in Chicago history than social justice piepreneur Broussard’s debut. It’s as much a tribute to her late father—a self-proclaimed “pie master”—as it is to local food icons. Both serve as inspirations for the endlessly inventive chef, who creates pies (sweet, savory, and whoopie), tarts, and fetching miscellanea informed by everything from pizza puffs, to Italian beef, to Chicago hot dogs, to the lentil soup at the Nile, the churros at Xoco, and the carrot cake at Lawrence’s Fish and Shrimp. The pies are gorgeous and alluring, and include a collection inspired by activists Broussard admires and profiles at length. But stick to the headnotes alone and a bittersweet portrait of a loving but complicated father-daughter relationship emerges. (Clarkson Potter, October 18)

Dine in Palestine, Heifa Odeh

In 2019 the blogger behind Fufu’s Kitchen got a nod from Saveur magazine (“best food culture blog”), and now here’s the print expression of Odeh’s command of the breadth of traditional Palestinian cooking (“layered” fattet hummus; freekeh-stuffed chicken, olive oil-preserved labneh) and creative flexes (za’atar cake with olives and halloumi, chocolate almond baklava, fudgy pomegranate brownies with tahini). If, unlike Odeh, you don’t live in a paradise of Middle Eastern grocery stores such as Chicago, you might appreciate a glossary and online sources for some of the more uncommon ingredients. Not everyone can stroll down South Harlem Avenue and price sahlep powder for their homemade ice cream. But that’s what search engines are for. (Page Street, September 13)

Listen to Your Vegetables, Sarah Grueneberg and Kate Heddings

The Monteverde chef and Top Chef runner-up is best known for pasta supremacy, so this encyclopedic 432-page collection (from artichoke to tomato) is a glorious surprise—even if it comes at the end of the growing season. Grueneberg is trained in the Italian aesthetic of simplicity and superior product, but even with that the variety contained within is exhaustive and a mine of useful tips and techniques (ex: don’t oil your vegetables before grilling). You probably don’t think you need eight asparagus recipes, but flip through them and you’ll see that you do. Bonus points for the unwritten assumption (Chapter 11) that pasta is a vegetable. (Harvest, October 25)

Bread Head: Baking for the Road Less Traveled, Greg Wade and Rachel Holtzman

If (like me) you have a visceral distaste for the Grateful Dead, you might not want to give this a chance. Much like an endless Jerry jam, the Publican Quality Bread head baker’s Dead references are . . . gratuitous. But press on. Arising from the sourdough pandemic, Wade’s approach to bread and pastry is, at its core, clear, precise, and beginner-friendly, even when he wades into the weeds. A staunch advocate for local and sustainably grown grains, Wade makes even the most challenging projects (maple rye kouign amann, anyone?) seem like achievable—if long-term—goals. If you’re even a casual restaurant goer, you’ve probably eaten Wade’s bread, and if you have no intention of mastering his signature multigrain sourdough, Bread Head serves as engrossing liner notes to what you might find on the shelves any given day at PQB’s marvelous new West Town retail bakery. (Norton, September 27)

Read More