Author Zach Mangan, founder of Kettl, a tea and teaware company based in New York City and Fukuoka, Japan, shares the stories of tea producers and craft of tea-making in his new book, Stories of Japanese Tea: The Regions, the Growers, and the Craft (Princeton Architectural Press, 2022). Originally a jazz drummer, Mangan first experienced fresh Japanese tea in Paris while on tour with his band in the mid-2000s. Following a two-year stint at Ito En, one of Japan’s largest tea distributors, he slowly built relationships with Japanese tea growers over several years, and began supplying tea to some of the best chefs in New York City. Kettl was eventually launched in 2015, and now has two locations in NYC.

Popularly known as “Rice Girl” for her rice subscription service serving up micro-seasonal blends of rice varieties, Momoko Nakamura has had an eclectic career: she’s been a former television producer of food shows like Iron Chef America, start-up founder, director of food events, restaurant consultant, and now, advocate for healthy living and author of culinary guide Plant-Based Tokyo. Beautifully photographed by Waki Hamatsu and published in 2019, this bilingual book showcases 45 dining establishments in the Tokyo and Shonan areas that focus on plant-based cuisine and sustainable food system practices. But it’s much more than a restaurant directory: it’s a series of profiles or mini-biographies of plant-based chefs around the city.

We spoke to Joe Yonan, the James Beard Award-winning food and dining editor of The Washington Post, about his cookbook, Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to the World's Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein. And he provided us with a recipe for his garlicky great northern beans and broccoli rabe over toast. The humble bean plays a starring role in many of the culinary cultures we cover, as evidenced by our “Bean Week” series, which included dispatches from Catalonia, Beijing, Mexico, Greece and Istanbul. So we were delighted to talk to Joe about this delicious, versatile and environmentally friendly protein, one that has gained new prominence in the current pandemic.

We recently spoke with Mexican chef Pati Jinich about her new cookbook, Treasures of the Mexican Table: Classic Recipes, Local Secrets (Mariner Books; November, 2021). Pati is host of the James Beard Award winning and Emmy nominated public television series Pati's Mexican Table and has published two other cookbooks on Mexican cuisine – the first also called Pati's Mexican Table (Mariner Books; March 2013) and the second, Mexican Today (Mariner Books; April 2016). She is also the host of the new PBS Primetime special La Frontera, where she travels along the Texas-Mexico border to explore its food and culture.

We spoke to travel writer and cook Yasmin Khan about her latest cookbook, Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus (W. W. Norton & Company, May 4, 2021). Author of two cookbooks, The Saffron Tales and Zaitoun, Yasmin turns her focus to the Eastern Mediterranean in Ripe Figs. Using the kitchen table as a lens through which to explore the issues of borders and identity in an interconnected world, she traces various migration stories in her travelogues and recipes. We chatted about the inspiration behind the book, her research process and the importance of documenting both the good and the bad in travel writing.

We recently spoke to Betty Liu about her new cookbook, My Shanghai (Harper Design, March 2021), which spotlights the home-style Shanghainese food she grew up eating. Organized by season, this handsome volume takes readers through a year in the Shanghai culinary calendar, with flavorful, deeply personal recipes that are daily fare for Betty and her family. It also provides a thorough introduction to the ingredients at the heart of the region’s cuisine and illuminates the area’s diverse communities and their food rituals. Betty has been sharing recipes since 2015 on her award-winning blog bettysliu.com and worked as a food photographer – her talent is on display in My Shanghai, for which she did the styling and photography.

We recently spoke to Marianna Leivaditaki about her cookbook, “Aegean: Recipes from the Mountains to the Sea” (Kyle Books, September 2020), which delves into the cuisine of Crete, the largest island in Greece and one of its most distinct. Marianna grew up on Crete, where her father was a fisherman and her mother ran the family’s restaurant, before later settling in the UK – she’s now the head chef at Morito Hackney Road in London. A skilled storyteller, she weaves an enveloping portrait of life on the island, which is simple but simultaneously rich, and presents its cuisine through a personal lens. The end result is a transporting love letter to Crete, an island with so much to give.

We recently spoke to Mely Martínez about her cookbook, “The Mexican Home Kitchen” (Rock Point, September 2020), which compiles the traditional home-style dishes that feed Mexican families day in and day out. These include comforting foods like caldo de pollo and carne con papas, celebratory recipes like mole poblano and pastel de cumpleaños, and classics like tamales and pozole, as well as basics like corn and flour tortillas, salsas, rice, and beans. Mely is best known for her popular blog, Mexico in My Kitchen, which she started in 2008 for her teenage son, hoping that someday he will use it to recreate the Mexican food his mom made for the family. Although born and raised in the city of Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mely has traveled to most states in Mexico and lived in several of them.

We recently spoke to Sharon Brenner about her mini-cookbook, “Athena: Cooking from Athens, Greece,” which introduces readers to Athenian-inspired dishes – with a focus on everyday food – as well as the experience of cooking and eating in Athens. It’s a small volume that opens the door to the city’s food culture. Now based in Los Angeles, CA, Sharon previously lived in Athens from 2014-2017 and has been regularly visiting Greece since 2011. The creator of the website Records in the Den, she has also published work, including food writing, in a number of zines and digital publications. Her various other culinary ventures include teaching cooking classes, running a monthly cookie pop-up and founding the dining series Athena Dinners, to be held at Marta Gallery in LA.

We recently spoke to Lisa Granik MW about her book, “The Wines of Georgia” (Infinite Ideas, November 2019). Granik became a Master of Wine in 2006, and was a Professor of Wine at the New York Institute of Technology from 2013-15. Currently she advises wine companies and regions seeking to improve their sales in the United States. Granik, who has written for publications such as The New York Times, The World of Fine Wine and Sommelier Journal, dives into Georgian wine culture in this title, explaining not only grape varieties, terroirs, winemaking methods and viticulture but also the centrality of wine to Georgian culture generally.

In our experience, one of the best ways to learn about noteworthy new cookbooks is to sidle up to a food writer and ask what they’ve been cooking from. With that in mind, we asked the authors featured in our CB Book Club this year to share their favorite cookbook or culinary-related book from 2019. Now we have a long list of titles to search out on our next trip to the local bookstore and plenty of inspiration to kickstart our kitchen experiments in 2020.