Here’s the thing… sometimes cookbooks by chefs can be, well, cheffy. Chefs have staff chopping and dicing and cleaning. They think nothing of making a rabbit stock to suffuse a dish. The good news is that we often learn from their books, if not in practice, then in theory. The bad news is that their recipes have too many steps and can involve ingredients that are hard to find. So the cookbook I discovered a great recipe in is a little cheffy, although it makes me want to eat in the restaurants these chefs run, which is mostly the point. Downtown Italian features the food and wine of Gabriel Thompson, Katherine Thompson and Joe Campanale (wine and cocktails.) Their restaurants in New York’s West and East Villages are dell’anima, L’Artusi, Anfora, and L’Apicio.
