Here's Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef by Massimo Bottura, chef of the three Michelin-starred Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. The restaurant is currently ranked third on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. The book follows Bottura's 25-year career, and walks the reader through four different periods in his restaurant's history.
The book is full of photography done by Stefano Graziani and Carlo Benvenuto; there are shots of "the noise in the kitchen and the noise in my head," as Bottura puts it in the introduction. This translates to photos of the restaurants and photos of Bottura's inspiration book, a collection of inspirational texts and images that he calls his "points of reference."
The dishes are all accompanied by brief essays that explain the background or theory of each dish, much in the way Daniel Patterson's Coi favored narrative recipes over literal ones. Unlike Patterson's book, however, Bottura also includes the actual recipes for everything in the back of the book: the best of both worlds?
Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef is out now from Phaidon (order on Amazon).
