Let’s face it. By and large, we all enjoy restaurant meals but what we are not so excited about is paying restaurant prices. Who among us hasn’t wondered how to recreate a favorite restaurant dish at home? I know that I have and I am willing to bet that those same thoughts have gone through your head as well. But while I have googled my favorite dishes, found recipes and tweaked them endlessly hoping to hit pay dirt, cookbook authors Leah Schapira and Victoria Dwek have done something that, for whatever reason, never would have occurred to me: they contacted dozens of restaurants and asked them to share their favorite recipes. Surprisingly enough, pretty much all the chefs they spoke to were happy to share.
The result? Secret Restaurant Recipes, a cookbook filled with stunning photographs that may just have your eyes popping out of your head, with more than 70 recipes from kosher restaurants spanning the globe. The 280-page book was a bit of a departure for Leah and Victoria, authors of four books in the “Made Easy” series, who typically develop their own recipes. But the results have surpassed even their own expectations.
The first run, 17,000 copies, sold out in the first few weeks, according to ArtScroll publicist Miriam Pascal. The book reached Amazon’s number one spot for kosher cookbooks, number three for all cookbooks and made it as high as the 47th most popular book on Amazon. Secret Restaurant Recipes was also featured on the Good Housekeeping website as a Chanukah party pick.
“People are loving the book,” said Leah. “So far it is the weeknight dishes that most people have tried, like sesame chicken, Portobello mushroom soup, eggplant chicken and the Cedarhurst chicken.” Chanukah time they started hearing about the dairy dishes like poutine and praline brownies.
According to Victoria, the book is turning out to be a fascinating read even for those who don’t cook.
“People who never buy cookbooks are getting this one,” said Victoria. “They read it cover to cover and find it so interesting.”
In fact, Secret Restaurant Recipes shares much of the charm that permeates the “Made Easy” series. Full of warm banter between Leah and Victoria, the book features not just gorgeous pictures and carefully laid out recipes, but tons of cooking tips, tidbits, words of wisdom from the chefs and other helpful suggestions. It also includes short introductions to each restaurant, sharing some of the flavor that makes each one unique.
The restaurants and recipes highlighted here literally run the gamut, both from the geographic and culinary perspectives. While it isn’t surprising to see high-quality restaurants listed in Brooklyn, Teaneck, London and Jerusalem, who knew that there was not just good, but fabulous kosher food to be had in Venice, Panama City, Oxnard, Phoenix and Mexico City?
What makes Secret Restaurant Recipes a great cookbook to me is that we tend to associate really great kosher cooking with a perfectly done steak, but quite frankly, I don’t want to eat steak every night. The Sweet Potato Soup from Citron + Rose in Philadelphia, the brainchild of Chef Karen Nicolas, named one of Food & Wine Magazine’s “Best New Chefs” in 2012, definitely called my name. A creamy pureed blend of sweet potatoes, apple, fennel, celery, coconut milk, cinnamon, honey and nutmeg, topped with beef chorizo meatballs, this is a soup that I can’t wait to make, especially given that I am not commuting 252 miles round trip for soup, tempting though it may be. Maybe it was the cold winter weather that had me salivating over the picture of Portobello Mushroom Soup from Java Cafe in Toronto, but having made this incredibly delicious mushroom, onion and garlic based soup, I can tell you I would happily down bowl after bowl of this stuff even during the dog days of summer. The Praline Brownies from the three Brooklyn locations of Bagels ‘N Greens looked so incredibly enticing I turned the page quickly before the calories somehow migrated off the page and onto my waist, but they are definitely on my short list of things to make next time I want to totally throw caution to the wind and indulge my passion for all things chocolate. And while I don’t know that Cereal Milk Ice Cream, an unusual concoction from Serendipity in Surfside, Florida, would have caught my eye, hearing from Victoria that it is her favorite recipe in the book definitely has me tempted to stick the canister from my ice cream maker back into my freezer so I can give this one a try. Ice cream, made with cornflake infused milk? How crazy is that?