Getting The Dish From Some Foody Superstars

Here is some of the best food writing, from elegant to ghetto and everything in between. We gave the books movie rating to give you an idea of where they stand on that spectrum.

Rated: G
The Kitchen Detective
Christopher Kimball, America's premier culinary sleuth, is the author of the popular newspaper column "The Kitchen Detective" that appears in 27 newspapers across the country. This book offers the Kitchen Detective's Best culinary cases, with foolproof recipes for everything from braised short ribs and Coca-Cola Chicken to pumpkin cheesecake and perfect pancakes. Further, entertaining essays explain how the Kitchen Detective "cracked the case, " accompanied by 100 black and white photographs highlighting some of his most intriguing findings.

Rated:PG 13
Medium Raw
In the ten years since his classic Kitchen Confidential first alerted us to the idiosyncrasies and lurking perils of eating out, from Monday fish to the breadbasket conspiracy, much has changed for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business—and for Anthony Bourdain.

Medium Raw explores these changes, moving back and forth from the author's bad old days to the present. Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-traveling professional eater and drinker, and even to fatherhood, Bourdain takes no prisoners as he dissects what he's seen, pausing along the way for a series of confessions, rants, investigations, and interrogations of some of the most controversial figures in food.

Beginning with a secret and highly illegal after-hours gathering of powerful chefs that he compares to a mafia summit, Bourdain pulls back the curtain—but never pulls his punches—on the modern gastronomical revolution, as only he can. Cutting right to the bone, Bourdain sets his sights on some of the biggest names in the foodie world, including David Chang, the young superstar chef who has radicalized the fine-dining landscape; the revered Alice Waters, whom he treats with unapologetic frankness; the Top Chef winners and losers; and many more.

And always he returns to the question "Why cook?" Or the more difficult "Why cook well?" Medium Raw is the deliciously funny and shockingly delectable journey to those answers, sure to delight philistines and gourmands alike.

Rated: NC17
Cooking Dirty
Cooking Dirty is a rollicking account of life “on the line” in the restaurants, far from culinary school, cable TV, and the Michelin Guide—where most of us eat out most of the time. It takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place.

From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a way of life in which “your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire.” The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking is a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the kitchen itself, as he tells it, is a place in which life’s mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried—a place where people from the margins find their community and their calling.

With this deeply affecting book, Sheehan (already acclaimed for his reviews) joins the first class of American food writers at a time when books about food have never been better or more popular.

Rated:R
Roasting in Hell's Kitchen
Everyone thinks they know the real Gordon Ramsay: rude, loud, pathologically driven, stubborn as hell.

Now, for the first time, the world's most famous—and infamous—chef tells the inside story of his life: his difficult childhood, his father's alcoholism and violence, his brother's heroin addiction, his short-circuited soccer career, and his fanatical pursuit of gastronomic perfection—everything that helped mold him into the culinary talent and media powerhouse that he is today. He also dishes the dirt on the rich and famous, and takes you behind the scenes of some of the great restaurants.

Honest, outrageous, and intensely personal, Roasting in Hell's Kitchen will not only change your perception of Gordon Ramsay but that of the cutthroat world of haute cuisine as well.