Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Three hot-topic food authors
Foodies who love to cook and those who just like to read cookbooks won’t want to miss three hot-topic titles.
Nguyen-Win situation
Easiest way to land a book deal? Wait for a publisher to come to you.
No successful author would recommend that path, but that’s exactly what happened to Nguyen Tran, who triumphed with Starry Kitchen, an illegal underground restaurant he started with his wife, Thi Tran, in their Los Angeles apartment.
Over the years, he’s enjoyed a gold mine of publicity from the New York Times, the New Yorker, Food & Wine Magazine, NPR and the Cooking Channel. So why even write a book?
“My publisher approached me,” said Tran, an adamant multitasker, chatting by cellphone while he walked his dog.
Three years ago he quit the restaurant, which had become a foodie destination. “We were on an emotional low and a professional high,” he said, explaining that he announced a Kickstarter campaign to raise $500,000 in 30 days. He made it to $150,000 — yes, even his “screw-ups” reveal a crazy-like-a-fox Midas touch.
“I feel like the secondary goal was money and the primary goal was to push so hard that another door would open.” What that door was, he couldn’t say.
But it did open a window of time to write a book, a deal he initially turned down.
“I told (the publisher) to (buzz) off and then I thought about it. I came back and said, ‘I need it to be a handbook for someone to start their own restaurant or to be scared (senseless) out of it.”
The resulting text chronicles his wild ride. Born to Vietnamese immigrant parents, he grew up in Dallas, bullied for being different. Eventually he earned a computer science degree and landed a lucrative dot-com job. When that world dot-bombed, he moved to Hollywood, where he sold TV reruns, then worked in the William Morris Agency mail room.
But the economy hit the skids in 2008 and, desperate for rent money, he started Starry Kitchen, which got busted by the health department for operating without a permit. Unfazed, he skirted the law for three months, then went legit, but not entirely, because he failed to pay his state sales tax. His staff tired of reduced paychecks and walked out. He replaced them with volunteers and soldiered on. Done with Starry Kitchen, he closed it and opened Button Mash, another hit.
If his back story sounds like a movie, it could be coming soon to a theater near you. Nguyen says there’s talk of adapting the book into a film. But who will play this zany entrepreneur? “I don’t have a defined answer. Like, I would want someone AsianAmerican — that would be really
nice — and someone who’s just really good. Randall Park” (“Fresh Off the Boat” and “The Interview”) “would be awesome.”
Like its author, the book is beyond quirky. Technically it’s a cookbook filled with 88 “Asian-Inspired” recipes from the restaurant. But Tran’s memoir, misadventures recounted with brutal honesty in salty language, drives the story. He writes like he blogs and he’s unapologetic about that. “If the book failed,” he said, “I needed to fail on my own terms, not because I hired someone to capture my voice.”
Fair enough. But while every venture seems fraught with disaster, failure never steps into the picture. He’s already on to the next big project, a Food Network pilot called “Big Bargain Eats” about traveling the U.S. in search of deals in high-end restaurants.
“I get paid to travel and eat? I called my manager and said, ‘I don’t care about fame or fortune, I’ll take it.’ “
The Scoop
Ice cream. You wouldn’t think that taking a deep dive into America’s signature frozen comfort food would lead to a series of shocking revelations.
But for Amy Ettinger, some facts, figures, experiences and anecdotes — uncovered while researching “The Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America” — shot jolts through her brain like a series of ice cream
headaches.
The discoveries by this seasoned journalist, who’s written for the Washington Post, the New York Times and the New Yorker, start barely 20 pages in during a visit to a respected creamery in her neighborhood of Santa Cruz, Calif. “The owner of Mission Hill said, ‘I don’t make my own ice cream base,’ and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? You’re not making everything on the stovetop? It was a shock having to come to terms with it; that homemade and artisanal ice cream is different than I assumed.”
A few chapters later she uncovers the co-packing conspiracy. Like many makers of frozen treats, uber hip L.A. creamery Coolhaus doesn’t make the cookies or the ice cream for its famous sandwiches. Founders Natasha Case and Freya Estreller talked to her on the record and what they said floored her. “No one is doing the cookie and ice cream making themselves and a lot of them are secretive,” Ettinger said. She did respect their honesty. “They said, ‘We’re businesswomen.’ “
Even a sidetrack on the history of soda fountains and pharmacies gobsmacked her: “I had the image in my head of ‘Happy Days’ and the ‘50s and Amy Ettinger’s “Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America” combines in-depth field reporting with her own menoir on her favorite dessert. roller skates until I learned about what people put in soda drinks at the turn of the century: cocaine, strychnine and arsenic.”
She lived through “layer after layer of shocking moments,” but the book is not some searing “60 Minutes” takedown of the industry. Rather it’s a sweet tale of her obsession, a yummy banana split layered with unflinching firsthand reporting that includes hands-on experience at the ultimate ice cream class at Penn State University, ride-alongs on a family-owned truck rolling through Bensonhurst, and a field trip to the
first U.S. dairy making gelato with water buffalo milk.
Readers will likely hang on every word and they’ll want all the details on her biggest shocker: While researching frozen custard in Wisconsin, she got carjacked in Milwaukee. Her recipe in that chapter is aptly titled: “NGB2 (Never Going Back to) Milwaukee Butter Pecan Custard.”
Yet, she never put down the pen. “I had a contract and I thought, ‘I’m not gonna let a random violent event keep me from doing this.’ I did travel a little differently after that. I took my husband and daughter with me and I think that made the book better.”
She wasn’t hurt during the incident. But she was scared. Still, her passion for the creamy dessert eventually trumped that recipe title. She says if she ever found herself in the Midwest again, she would definitely drive back to Leon’s Frozen Custard. “I happen to love butter pecan ice cream,” she said, her voice going all dreamy with the memory of spooning it up. “I love that flavor.”
The 40-Year-Old Vegan
When Newport Beach, Calif., marketing consultant Sandra Sellani conjured the title of her latest book, “The 40-YearOld-Vegan,” it came to her like a bolt from the blue.
“My nephew watched that movie hundreds of times so it was somewhere in my subconscious and one day it just hit me, ‘Oh my gosh!’ And then the subtitle came.” (“75 Recipes to Make You Leaner, Cleaner, and Greener in the Second Half of Life”).
That play on the popular Judd Apatow comedy telegraphs the message Sellani and her twin sister/co-author, Susan Sellani-Hosage, want to get across to readers. They believe that the second half of your life can be healthier and that going vegan is simpler and more delicious than you might think.
“Forty is such a milestone for people — it’s the age when they look back and say, ‘I see how I lived my first 40 years, do I need to change anything?’ “
Sellani is a living advertisement for eating a plant-based diet. She’s fit, with glossy hair and a glowing complexion. Moreover she does not look nipped, tucked and Botoxed into that youthful appearance. You’d never guess she’s 57.
“I’m almost 58,” she says, adding that she has more energy since turning vegan. “Getting older is inevitable but aging is optional. We can get older and still feel our best,” she said.
She wasn’t always so healthy. “I was the biggest junk food junkie on the planet.” All through high school she ate burgers, fries and shakes and bought soda by the liter. “I was an eating machine. I didn’t care. I didn’t have a bad complexion and I didn’t gain weight because I had very high metabolism.”
But it all caught up with her at 22. “I got ulcerative colitis.” Her doctor put her on four different medications — permanently. “He told me I was at three times the risk for colon cancer.”
Then he wanted to talk diet. She thought he would read her the riot act. Instead, “He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t eat any fresh fruits and vegetables.’ What?”
That sounded wrong even to the candy bar queen. She took the medications and went on her way until she met a vegetarian and started exploring that lifestyle.
At 25 she gave up meat, and her colitis symptoms began to subside. At first they vanished for a month at a time and then for a year at a time. “Then I gave up dairy (at 50) and it was gone completely. And I’m eating fresh fruits and vegetables, everything the doctor told me not to.”
It’s becoming common knowledge that a vegan diet can help reverse diabetes and heart disease, and Sellani voiced other concerns.
“There are so many reasons to do this diet: because you care about animals, health and
Sandra and Susan Sellani collaborated on a book of recipes with plenty of inspiration about how to go vegan either full or part time.
the environment. Meat production is so inefficient, it takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef. ”(Ten percent of the author’s share of the book benefits nonprofit advocacy group Mercy for Animals.)
But Sellani isn’t preachy; she’s positive and downright inspirational providing recipes, interviews with successful vegans and strategies to keep you on the right path, including a 52-week plan to make one change every seven days and be fully converted in a year. And if you’re not, that’s OK too, she writes. “Even if you never become 100 percent vegan, but eliminate some of the saturated animal fat products from your diet, you would already be doing something good for yourself and the planet.”
It’s not about adhering to a punishing diet, it’s about being kinder to yourself, animals and Mother Earth. “There’s such a joy that comes with this lifestyle,” Sellani said.