New Chicago food and beverage books you should read

There is a relatively small crop of Chicago food and drink books this spring (unlike last year). And only two of these new titles are available through the usual retail corridors. If they strike a fancy, please don’t reward the sniveling anticipatory obedience of the oligarchy by shopping online. Visit your local brick-and-mortar bookstore. For victory.

Bon Vivant Issue 7: Southwest Road Trip, Hugh Amano, editor (A Sterling Bay Production), winter 2025

It’s the end of the road for Amano’s biannual(ish) culinary travel journal. This one is a semisolo project of sorts: a 101-page essay tracking a road trip from Palm Springs to El Paso with photographer-designer (and his soon-to-be-spouse) Alexis Teichman.

I’ve been writing about the former Fat Rice–Sterling Bay chef’s literary projects for 16 years, and as ever, they’re never just about the food (though a seed of inspiration for this final chapter came out of the Bobby Flay tribute at Next).

Amano’s words paint the sun-washed deserts, mountains, date farms, and diners of the southwest as vividly as Teichman’s photographs, and while the foods they encounter are certainly portrayed compellingly, just as often it’s about the brief encounters with the locals within. Eight recipes inspired by these joints bring up the rear (carne adovada, stacked enchiladas, flautas), but it’s not a guidebook—you’ll have to Google the addresses yourself.

Instead, like all the issues of Bon Vivant past, food is the natural vehicle for understanding and empathizing with the culture that created it.

So why stop now? This road trip is to be succeeded by another, to Bozeman, Montana, where Amano and Teichman are moving this spring. “It takes some of the pressure off turning 50,” he told me. “I don’t want my body breaking down in any kind of food service job. I’m always pursuing that fantasy of just writing books.”

 To that end, you can look for the next one in the spring of 2026 when his cookbook collaboration with Atlanta chef Ron Hsu rolls off the presses.

Unfortunately, if you haven’t scored a copy yet, you can’t get your hands on Bon Vivant Issue 7 anymore. Just like Amano, come April, it’s gone.

The Balls (Le Polpette), Alfredo Ramos

Perhaps the roughest of the crop is this self-published memoir/cookbook by the chef of Andersonville’s rustic Italian Bar Roma—and that’s a good thing. Unpolished but earnest, it recounts in 49 pages Ramos’s rise from pot-smoking southwest suburban skid, to pot-smoking Kendall College overachiever, to peripatetic kitchen journeyman, to opening chef—and for the past nine years, head chef—at Bar Roma, which is where you can buy the book.

The title refers to the restaurant’s signature meatball repertoire. Six of them are represented, along with a fetching collection of classic and innovative Italian recipes, plus a few curveballs, like weed-infused dark chocolates that suggest Ramos still has a bit of the skid left in him. Ramos is also old-school without coming off like a goon, and frequently hilarious in a way not often encountered in restaurant lifers anymore. In his intro, the chef admits his inspiration for writing was to keep his daughter out of the industry (it didn’t work), and in his acknowledgments, he thanks his editor for eighty-sixing “some of the dumb, sick, childish, words and stories I told.” I wish that editor would have paid more attention to sentence structure and less on preventing Ramos from being Ramos.

Birrias, Jesse Valenciana, the Quarto Group

Now based in Nashville, where he caters under the name Secret Bodega, Chicago-born Valenciana previously published two cookbooks with Crust Fund Pizza’s John Carruthers while working as the national events manager for Goose Island. He admits he was turned off by the traditional Jalisciense goat stew as a kid and didn’t develop a passion for it until the pandemic. That was well into the crispy birria/melted cheese taco craze that, via 80s Tijuana, erupted out of Los Angeles four years earlier. For better or worse, that trend has led most Americans to believe that birria is strictly made from beef. In fact, Mesoamericans made something like it from wild game, according to Texas Monthly taco editor José R. Ralat. Further, birria is not an ingredient, but a technique, employed in various Mexican regions with chicken, fish, and pork, in addition to goat and beef. Valenciana understands all of this without getting too bogged down in the details, offering variations on all five proteins in every possible execution, from birria tacos, burritos, and ramen, to sausages, smashburgers, Chicago-style puffs, and crunchwraps.  

Chicago Cocktails: An Elegant Collection of Over 100 Recipes Inspired by the Windy City, Nicole Schnitzler, Cider Mill Press

Part of a series of hardcover cocktail collections from around the globe, the Chicago entry very loosely organizes its recipes in neighborhood clusters. On its face, that promises a varied representation of the creative diversity that has evolved behind the city’s sticks ever since the Violet Hour ushered in the modern cocktail renaissance in 2007. And sure, there’s a fair mix of old and new, like Q&As with OGs like the VH’s Toby Maloney and Crafthouse Cocktails’s Charles Joly, and relatively newer players like Julia Momosé of Kumiko and Bronzeville Winery’s Cecilia Cuff. And yet, I’m not sure how many home barkeeps are clamoring for four separate espresso martini builds, or five old-fashioneds, especially when there are only five south-side cocktails represented (two of them from one bar) and only one Malört recipe, which is especially weird when the intro devotes a whole page to acknowledging its influence on the city’s cocktail maturity.

Bridging the Gap: Ethiopian Fusion Cooking: Recipes from the Kitchen of Wilhelmine Stordiau, by Wilhelmine Stordiau and Harry Kloman

I wouldn’t typically include a free download from a retired University of Pittsburgh journalism professor in this roundup (even if I hadn’t taken his class as a freshman), but there is a Chicago connection: a recipe for tefach injera, or “injera bread pudding” from Zenash Beyene, owner of Edgewater’s Ras Dashen, which closed in 2022. It was on the menu, but it’s unusual, given there’s no Amharic word for “pudding,” nor are there any desserts native to Ethiopian cuisine.  

The text itself is singular, given that Armenian Ethiopian entrepreneur Stordiau, who lives in Germany, has developed her own repertoire of hybrid dishes, applying Ethiopian flavor profiles and techniques to European foods, like berbere deviled eggs, penne with minchet abish wot (spicy chopped beef), or cracked wheat and safflower milk risotto. There’s even a chapter devoted to desserts, in defiance of Ethiopia’s lack of a “sweets culture.”

Kloman is, of course, the author of Mesob Across America, a survey of Ethiopian food across the U.S., and probably knows more about the subject than any other non-
Ethiopian. As the tipster who alerted me to Uptown’s terrific Oromo Michuu Restaurant, he often knows more about Chicago’s East African restaurant doings than I do.