Brown Sugar Kitchen

Description

A book with a strong sense of place, authority, and playfulness for those who feel outsized love for Brown Sugar Kitchen and the avid fans of Southern cooking and barbecue cookbooks, this is a restaurant book with an accessible author and an even stronger sense of place and community. This restaurant book celebrates its home in West Oakland with visual storytelling in addition to 75 recipes and sidebars that introduce us to the characters, history, and happenings that make BSK special. Recipes are for soul food rooted in traditional Southern foodways, but reflecting the migration of those foodways North (Tanya is from Rochester, NY), and infused with the Bay Area ethos (locally-sourced, respect for ingredients, interpreted by a La Varenne-trained chef).

Tanya Holland is chef/owner/urban pioneer/restaurateur of Brown Sugar Kitchen. She was formally trained at La Varenne and is a former Food Network television personality (her show was called Melting Pot). Her first cookbook, New Soul Cooking, was published by STC in 2003. Holland opened B-Side BBQ, a restaurant specializing in barbecue, located around the corner from Brown Sugar Kitchen, in 2011. Her professional associations include Les Dames, AIAP, and the University of Virginia.

"Tanya Holland has made a beautiful commitment to West Oakland, creat-ing a vibrant, joyful restaurant that is a pillar of the local community. With robust, soulful recipes using seasonal and local ingredients, this book is a wonderful reflection of the spirit she has fostered at Brown Sugar Kitchen." - Alice Waters "Tanya Holland and her Brown Sugar Kitchen represent everything that is great about Oakland: diversity, collegiality, rugged entrepreneurialism, and soulful authenticity. In her restaurant and this cookbook, she has captured something deliciously simple yet extraordinarily powerful: the food that embodies our shared American roots, and its power to bring us together." - Aisha Tyler, comedienne, actress, and author of Self-Inflicted Wounds "Tanya's come-hither cookbook inspired both the armchair traveler and the armchair chowhound in me. Reading it, I imagined the pleasure of liv-ing in West Oakland, having a regular seat of my own at Brown Sugar's counter, and ordering up my favorite dishes without even having to look at the menu. With this book in hand, I know that every choice is a winner." - Sara Moulton, host of Sara's Weeknight Meals on public television "To be outside the South at the Brown Sugar Kitchen in Oakland, California eating shrimp n' grits with a side of cornbread and a glass of lemonade is priceless!" - Taj Mahal