Bourdain offers simple recipes for cooking at home

Bourdain. Ever a showman at heart, he remains true to his brand, working hard to shock and amuse loyal fans.

At the end of it all, this book is Bourdain’s best effort at maturity, told with playfulness and heart. After so many years of seeking out the weird and living to tell the tale, the scabrous, trash-talking Bourdain seems happiest on familiar ground: home. and fermented ingredients that can transform everyday veggies into tsunami waves of zest and zip.

We’re talking soy sauce and vinegar, breadcrumbs and capers, miso and kombu, Chinese pickles and dried shiitakes, tiny fishy things like dried shrimp and oilpacked anchovies, which are umami-bombs waiting to happen.

Unlike so many trite culinary glossaries, this one is not shy about breaking out a recipe to make a point: What to do with leftover miso? (Make butterscotch.) Curry leaves? (Indian curd rice.)

As a celery lover, I’m thrilled about Braised Cold Celery Hearts Victor (a retro cocktail snack that the authors suggest pairing with icy gin martinis); Kung Pao Celeries; and Celery Salad (with golden raisins, pistachios, and blue cheese).

Want to know how to char asparagus like a steak, bake Quiche Lorraine sans bacon, discover a transformative technique for smashing chickpeas into falafel, or whip up a meatless Tex-Mex shepherd’s pie?

It’s all here: Tastebud-tantalizing recipes! Remarkably cliché-free prose! Glaringly bright photos!

This is how Lucky Peach prepares veggies, y’all. Sometimes all you need is fat, acid and salt to give an electrical surge to flatlining shrooms, broccoli and collards.

‘The Red Rooster Cookbook: The Story of Food and Hustle in Harlem’ by Marcus Samuelsson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $37.50)

Marcus Samuelsson’s story plays like a classic American blues song.

Born into poverty in Ethiopia, orphaned as a toddler, adopted and raised by Swedish parents, he went on to cook the Obamas’ first state dinner at the White House. This after becoming the youngest chef ever to earn three stars from The New York Times (for his cooking at Aquavit), this after picking up a James Beard Award for best chef in Manhattan.

A few years ago, Samuelsson opened Red Rooster in his New York neighborhood, and for a boy who grew up on James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Nina Simone and other black artists his Swedish father turned him on to, it was like finding his home. “Harlem.” he writes. “It was the only place I ever lived where I felt both invisible and noticed.” This made him happy, and the cooking he turned out at the Rooster — largely Southern soul food, injected with multicultural piquancy and panache — made his customers happy, too.

Flip through these recipes, and you’ll understand.

Shoebox Ham is brined, rubbed with spices and charred black. Fried Yardbird is marinated in coconut milk and buttermilk, then cooked to an audacious Harlem crisp in peanut oil. Catfish is panfried and topped with pecans, raisins, capers, apples, all burnished brown in soy sauce.

Samuelsson has reawakened American soul food to a bright, lovely, Democratic tune. It is both uniquely his, and ours for the taking. The music he swings to was there in his soul all along. It just took Harlem to coax it out. “The Red Rooster Cookbook” is sexy, hot and strutting with flavor.

There is a lot to see within American Cut’s ambitious 18,500 square feet of space, whether in the firstfloor bar and lounge, the 125-seat dining room, bar and private dining rooms on the second level, or on the rooftop bar. Art deco with a masculine air — sleek ornamentation marked by gold, iron and brick — fills this modern American steakhouse at the Shops Buckhead Atlanta.

It’s all quite flashy. Sometimes in a good way, like the tableside preparation of the Plank Smoked Old Fashioned, the standout drink on the cocktail menu.

The American Cut signature item that did impress was the 40-ounce Tomahawk Chop for two ($115). Gorgeously plated and executed to order (medium rare), this 30-day, dry-aged steak was juicy, tender and deeply flavorful.

Less so for a markedly fatty 14-ounce New York strip ($44) ordered medium rare but served medium; for a 20-ounce bone-in rib-eye ($52) overly seasoned with a pepper-heavy pastrami spice rub; for smoked short ribs; and even for sliders where both meat and bun were dry.

If American Cut wants to compete as a steakhouse in Atlanta, it’s got to get the meat and potato thing down. Otherwise, it risks being merely a swanky bar to grab a drink before or after a dinner eaten elsewhere.