Hubert Keller's Souvenirs

Book excerpt: From a James Beard award winner, “part memoir, part cookbook . . . fresh takes on traditional French cuisine, with small anecdotes that introduce each dish.”(Booklist) Souvenirs is a memoir cookbook written by the multitalented Hubert Keller: celebrity chef, restaurateur, and Frenchman. Through personal stories and 120 recipes, the book explores his classical training and traces his development as a creative superstar chef. Keller apprentices in a Michelin three star–rated restaurant at the age of sixteen. He moves from his native Alsace, to southern France, and is inspired by the cuisine of the sun while working with the great French chefs of his time, Roger Vergé, Paul Bocuse, and Gaston Lenôtre. He learns to adapt to challenging new environments in South America, and the United States, and charts his own path into the newest frontiers of the restaurant business. The book is organized by seminal themes in Keller’s life, starting with his family in France, and ending back there again in the ”Holiday” chapter. The myriad recipes, which have been adapted for the home cook, are intertwined with 125 photographs by award-winning photographer Eric Wolfinger; images of family and friends, food and cuisine, and the places and landscapes of France, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, which all make up chef Keller’s life.