Cookbooks · Collaboration · Ghostwriting
Cookbooks are usually written by someone who has never worked a service, or attempted by a chef who has never finished a manuscript. Almost none are made by an owner — by somebody who signed the lease and the merchant credit apps.
I’ve been in the kitchen with the dining room full and the impact printer running a cascade of tickets from the pass to the floor. I’ve written an 800-page manuscript, cut it to 275, and taken it through query and submission. And I’ve sat at a shared desk running payroll and found there was enough to cover everyone except myself.
The commissioned book
Your book, self-published, sold at the host stand and in the gift shop. No agent, no submission, no waiting on New York. Work-for-hire: you own the copyright outright and every copy sold is yours.
Six to nine months from first interview to finished files. The right answer for most single restaurants, and by some distance the fastest money back.
From $25,000 · single roomThe proposal — 90 days
A publisher doesn’t buy a cookbook, they buy a proposal. Ninety days to build one: the concept and argument for the book, chapter architecture, twelve to eighteen recipes tested and written, comparative title analysis, market and platform section, a sample chapter, and the pitch letter.
About twelve to fifteen hours of the chef’s time, taken in recorded sessions around service. You can stop here and own everything.
$4,500–6,000 per monthFinding the agent
A targeted agent list, personalized queries, the follow-up, the calls, and the revisions an agent asks for before they’ll take it out. Then submission to editors alongside them.
Ends when an agent signs you and a publisher makes an offer — or when we agree the book belongs at a regional press instead, which needs no agent at all.
$1,500 per month, capped at six monthsWriting the book
The full manuscript: ninety to a hundred and twenty recipes tested and headnoted, the narrative chapters, front and back matter, the photography shot list and direction on set, and every round of publisher edits through copyedit and pass pages.
Twelve to eighteen months. Paid out of the publisher’s advance, not out of the restaurant.
Share of advance and royalties, or flat feeMost restaurants arrive certain they want one thing and leave having discovered they wanted the other. The questionnaire asks about your budget, how many copies this room can realistically sell, where you picture people buying it, and how much control you want — then tells you whether to publish it yourself, take it to a trade house, go to a regional press, or wait a year. It shows its working, and nothing is recorded.
I started at garde manger in Jackson, Mississippi, making salads and pizzas. I moved to the hot line, and eventually to the helm of Underground 119, where I made an uncountable number of crab quesadillas.
Then I owned La Finestra, and worked every job in it — dishwasher, sauté, HR administrator, unlicensed therapist.
In New Orleans I was executive sous at Galliano, running the pass until COVID shut us down. Then executive chef at Atchafalaya, from the first day we reopened to the first full room. The higher you climb, the less you get to cook.
I’m a sommelier. I’ve cooked at the James Beard House five times. I was the food, wine and travel correspondent at Okra Magazine. I’ve done a dozen Food Network episodes, and the third season of ABC’s The Taste, on Bourdain’s team.
La Finestra worked. It worked right up until the rent was about to double and the downtown it depended on was going off a cliff. I did the arithmetic and closed a restaurant that was full.
There is no book of it. The room, Jimmy the bartender’s one-liners, the raviolo al uovo that nearly every table ordered — that’s gone, and there is nothing on a shelf anywhere that says it happened.
Your restaurant is a business with a clock on it too. Owners sell, leases end, neighborhoods turn, chefs depart. The book stays.
For a commissioned book, the fee and the printing — and you keep every copy sold. For the publishing route, the Phase I retainer is the only money that leaves your restaurant. Phase II is contingent. Phase III is paid out of the publisher’s advance, and photography is the publisher’s line item, not yours.
You can stop after any phase and own everything produced up to that point.
Twelve to fifteen hours across ninety days for the proposal, taken in ninety-minute recorded sessions in your own dining room between lunch and dinner. I do the transcribing, the testing, the writing and the industry work.
If you can’t find fifteen hours, we shouldn’t do it — and I’d rather find that out in week one than in month five.
Which recipes go in is a business decision we make together, and there’s a long tradition of the withheld one. What sells a cookbook is the voice and the story, not the formula. Nobody has ever eaten at a restaurant less because they owned its book.
That’s an argument for the next one, not against it. An older book means a generation of customers who never owned one, and a track record an editor can point at as proof the thing sells. Second books from established houses are an easier sell than first ones.
For a lot of restaurants that is the right answer, and I’ll tell you when it is — that’s Phase 0. What a publisher gives you is distribution you can’t build yourself, a print run someone else finances, and review coverage that only goes to trade titles. What self-publishing gives you is margin on every copy you sell at the host stand. Different businesses, and only one of them is right for you.
Yours. The recipes, the restaurant’s name, the copyright, all of it. I work as a collaborator with a credit line, and where that credit sits — cover, title page, or introduction — is settled in writing before the first payment, not after.
Let’s have lunch. We’ll talk about what you want a book to do, what it would cost you in money and in hours, and whether there is one here at all.
Sometimes there isn’t, and I’ll tell you so. You will have lost an afternoon and gained an opinion from somebody who has been on your side of the table.
If there is a book, you’ll want a proposal. If there isn’t, we’ll have another lunch some time and philosophize about the industry, our fragile city and where they’re headed.