Off the Menu: Staff Meals from America's Top Restaurants

by Marissa Guggiana

Marissa Guggiana spent months on the road, interviewing, travelling, photographing, and sharing staff (or family) meals at more than fifty of America’s top sustainable restaurants from coast to coast. 

For every lunch or dinner service, there is a staff meal. The best chefs in the best restaurants take their limitations—affordability, ingredients, and time—and create meals worthy of their compatriots. Ranging from small plates to multi course extravaganzas, the concept is A well-fed staff is a happy one.

Guggiana looked for chefs that sourced locally, thoughtfully, with a big eco-picture in mind and a well-fed staff at their heart. The result is simply a no-holds-barred trip behind the kitchen door, introducing you to every chef, sous-chef, line cook, server, bus boy, bartender, hostess, sommelier, dishwasher, and manager—all of whom you will come to adore. Off the Menu, an homage to cooking with love and leftovers, makes accessibility a delight. Lush, colorful, homegrown, and delicious, it is packed with lessons, tips, substitutes, anecdotes, and American wine and beer suggestions.
 
At Vetri in Philadelphia, we get a family recipe from Chef Marc Vetri’s father and at Anne Quatrano’s Bacchanalia, we are whisked into the adjoining Star Provisions, described as a “culinary dream shop,” for bahn mi sandwiches. We go from gumbo to hot dogs, chicken and biscuits to duck and lettuce wraps, Tuscan kale salad to Chile Verde. It’s all here.
 
The icing on the cake is the chef’s Guggiana’s own Escoffier Questionnaire, is a playful epicurean take on the Proust questionnaire. Who better to recommend the best coffee shop or the perfect restaurant for a splurge, than the top chefs in the country? Find out where Paul Liebrandt of Corton goes for an after-work meal and the go-to-guilty-pleasure treat of Chef Michael White of Marea. The restaurants included vary from vegetarian to rustic, old-world Italian cuisine, from Asian-fusion to contemporary Mexican, from Scandinavian to Oyster bar. These are the meals that make a staff a family and family part of the staff.

Inside Off the Menu you will find 100 recipes from more than 50 of the nation's top restaurants. Each entry includes profiles of the restaurants, Q&As with the chefs, behind-the-scenes trips to the kitchens, and dining out tips, restaurant tricks, and cooking techniques from the cream of the culinary crop. Pull back the curtain on the staff meal, and find new, exciting ways to feed your family from the best in the business.
 
• More than 50 Profiles of America’s Top Restaurants.
•  "Escoffier Questionnaires": Interviews with America’s Best Chefs.
• Behind-the-scenes at America's best restaurants, featuring tips and tricks from the nation's best chefs.
• More than 150 delicious, affordable, family-style recipes refined for the home cook.
• More than 150 photos.

A selection of the Good Cook Book Club.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2011

About the author

Marissa Guggiana is the author of Primal Cuts: Cooking With America's Best Butchers (Welcome Books, October 2010), president of Sonoma Direct, a family business providing sustainably raised meats, the co-founder of Secret Eating Society, and a leader in Slow Food, for which she was the charcuterie curator at the inaugural Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco. A regular contributor to Saveur.com, since 2008 Marissa has been the co-editor and contributor to Meatpaper, a quarterly magazine exploring the fleischgeist. Marissa is committed to changing the food system to maintain the strength and independence of small farms and ranches. She is a fellow with Roots of Change, an organization to create a sustainable food system as the new mainstream. She also sits on the board of Ag Innovations Network, an NGO that facilitates communication for the stakeholders in regional food systems.
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Reviews

[Jody Crabtree · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this - recipes are really easy to do and so far delicious. I think that meals top notch chefs cook for their restaurant families are recipes worth trying. I tried the fettuccine with tuna and it was great. I never could have imagined something made with canned tuna could be that delicious (of course, I used good imported tuna, not St*rkist {sorry, Charlie}). Next I want to try Old Sober and Mise En Place Ramen.

[jess · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly, this is a great concept, but the author's writing style and descriptions lead me to believe there wasn't a food writing-friendly editor available. The writing is flat and basic, and almost comically so. I devour cookbooks on a near-weekly basis from my local library, and I've never read (and I read - every page! out of almost dumbfounded-shock) quite as lackluster as this. And the interviews with the chefs, layed out as they were, was boring, even when they had interesting things to say.

[Sangita Vasikaran]

standing in for off menu magazine issue 1

[Cherrylyn B · Rating 5 out of 5]

The concept of restaurant family dinners for the staff fascinates me. For some reason what I enjoyed most about this book are the pictures of the staff eating together.

[Deb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look behind the scenes of restaurants across the county. I enjoyed the chef interviews and will hold on to this book to use as a reference for places to try if I visit any of the cities noted

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Off the Menu: Staff Meals from America's Top Restaurants by Marissa Guggiana is filled with amazing recipes that people actually want to eat. I can't tell you how hungry I am from reading this. So many amazing comfort food recipes with a gourmet twist. Holy YUM!

[Susie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the idea of this cookbook and it had some interesting recipes but it wasn't too groundbreaking (which of course is true of staff meals). I think this is more interesting as a look at the behind the scenes of restaurants.

[Angie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look at what chefs make for their staff, but not a cookbook I would keep on the shelf

[Austin Ferrari · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that I paged through , but never had a chance to read yet.
Marissa is a great lady and author.

[Radhika · Rating 3 out of 5]

a cook book worth buying--lots of recipes, many of them easy to prepare. The book is also well-edited, which you can't take for granted in a cook book!

[Glitter · Rating 5 out of 5]