Here are 90 books that Yes, Chef fans have personally recommended if you like
Yes, Chef.
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Frans Johansson is the Co-Founder and CEO at The Medici Group, an enterprise solutions firm that helps organizations build and sustain high-performing teams through our revolutionary team coaching platform: Renaissance. Our firm's ethos--diversity and inclusion drive innovation--is informed by our work with over 4,000 teams in virtually every sector and by his two books The Medici Effect and The Click Moment.
This is the most complete take on how to bring diversity, inclusion, and belonging into your team. This is a very practical guide that shows you how to implement this process step by step. Not only does she explain how to respond to the negative tropes, but she also lays out detailed approaches to make sure your allies and angels do maximum good. A must-read if you want to avoid the common mistakes that bog down this process.
In this groundbreaking guide, a management expert outlines the transformative leadership skill of tomorrow-one that can make it possible to build truly diverse and inclusive teams which value employees' need to belong while being themselves.
Humans have two basic desires: to stand out and to fit in. Companies respond by creating groups that tend to the extreme-where everyone fits in and no one stands out, or where everyone stands out and no one fits in. How do we find that happy medium where workers can demonstrate their individuality while also feeling they belong?
Although I’ve worked in many professions and industries, a common theme in all my jobs is that I love helping people succeed in their careers. I’ve started or sponsored employee networks that focused on professional development, I’m a certified coach that focuses on propelling a client’s career, and I am a conference keynote speaker on the topics of careers and leadership. Everyone deserves to have a great career that makes them want to jump out of bed on Monday morning and that provides a good living and lifestyle. I love to make that happen!
I love this book for its idea and evidence that generalists, and not specialists, are often the most successful.
With examples of how those who cross domains are the most impactful inventors, it gives great hope for those broad thinkers who explore diverse experiences and careers to develop skills. It’s validation for those who haven’t quite figured out what they want to be when they grow up, with the idea that “frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers.”
A must-read for job seekers and for human resources professionals.
'Fascinating . . . If you're a generalist who has ever felt overshadowed by your specialist colleagues, this book is for you' - Bill Gates
The instant Sunday Times Top Ten and New York Times bestseller Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award A Financial Times Essential Reads
A powerful argument for how to succeed in any field: develop broad interests and skills while everyone around you is rushing to specialize.
From the '10,000 hours rule' to the power of Tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialization and many…
Frans Johansson is the Co-Founder and CEO at The Medici Group, an enterprise solutions firm that helps organizations build and sustain high-performing teams through our revolutionary team coaching platform: Renaissance. Our firm's ethos--diversity and inclusion drive innovation--is informed by our work with over 4,000 teams in virtually every sector and by his two books The Medici Effect and The Click Moment.
Amy coined the term psychological safety, and in this book, she tells you how to create that environment in order to build high-performance teams. This book walks you through every step needed and how to respond to the most common speed bumps when building an inclusive culture. She connects a diversity of every dimension to the process, and her work is a must-read.
The next level of breakthrough thinking in organizational learning, leadership, and change Harvard professor Amy Edmondson shows how leaders can make organizational learning happen by building teams that learn. Based on years of research and case studies from Verizon, Bank of America, and Children's Hospital, Edmondson outlines the factors that typically prevent groups from learning, such as the fear of failure, groupthink, power structures, and information hording. She shows how leaders can control these factors by encouraging reflection, creating psychological safety, and overcoming defensive routines that inhibit the sharing of ideas, among others. Leaders can use practical management strategies to…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I have a passion for helping people realize being better through sharing my thoughts and experiences to guide them on their path. My curiosity of understanding “why people do what they do?” started when I was 13. The search for this questions evolving answer led me on an educational, career, and personal journey that authored a unique perspective to move people forward. Working with people for over 25 years through clinical therapy, personal coaching, and now through my company Rhodes Smith Consulting, I see patterns in the struggle to transform. Books offer me new perspectives or reinforce old ones in expanding my knowledge and helping people master their own intentions. Enjoy!
How well do we know someone? Malcom Gladwell asks readers to explore biases in a way that begins to question the personal interactions we have each day. Using examples based on prejudice, assumption, fear, false trust, and preconceived notion, the book exposes the nature of human connection and an internal battle we face when interacting with or judging others. Our unconscious actions are built from survival instinct and previous experiences that become exposed when we meet someone new or cannot reconcile someone’s actions with whom we thought they were. This inability to understand others impacts how we navigate our lives and decern perceived threats that often result in wrong actions being taken. This book begs us to look deeper into the assumptions we carry within ourselves when Talking to Strangers.
The highly anticipated new book from Malcom Gladwell, host of the chart-topping podcast Revisionist History.
With original archival interviews and musical scoring, this enhanced audiobook edition of Talking to Strangers brings Gladwell's renowned storytelling to life in his unparalleled narrating style.
The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger's motives?
I grew up in a family of chefs and restaurant owners, so it’s probably no surprise that food plays a major role in my debut novel, All Stirred Up. (The two main characters are, in fact, chefs and restaurant owners. You write what you know!) Cooking plays a major part in my life as well—I’m always making something for family and loved ones. It’s probably no surprise that I love a good food book as well, whether it be fiction, memoir, or history. On my list are just five of my favourites.
Gabrielle Hamilton isn’t just a ‘reluctant chef’ (in her own words), she’s also an absolutely exquisite writer (her MFA really paid off!). Her memoir traces her life and love of food from her New Jersey childhood, through her many professional ups and downs and international travels (I especially love the parts where she’s staying at her Italian mother-in-law’s home, describing the incredible produce she was able to get. Oh, the tomatoes!) Did I extra love this because she grew up in the same small town I was born in? Maybe, but it’s a wonderful book no matter where you’re from.
A sharply crafted and unflinchingly honest memoir. This is a rollicking, passionate story of food, purpose and family.
Blood, Bones & Butter follows the chef Gabrielle Hamilton's extraordinary journey through the places she has inhabited over the years: the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey, where she was often fed by complete strangers and learned the essence of hospitality; and the kitchen of her beloved Italian mother-in-law, who serves as the link between Hamilton's idyllic past and her…
I was born and raised in Northern California, right on the banks of the Sacramento River. While I didn’t realize it growing up, it was an epicenter for outdoor adventures. Along with skiing, snowboarding, hiking, wakeboarding, and camping, I always read a lot. My dad was worried that I would have no sense of direction because I was always in the back of our van or RV reading a book. That led to writing…and I had my first article published in a wakeboarding magazine when I was 15 years old. Traveling always took a backburner to reading, but now it’s front and center of my writing.
Anyone who has ever worked in the food or hospitality industry—as a cook, a waitress, a hostess, a barista, or otherwise—can identify with this book.
The restaurant business is a different beast, and Anthony Bourdain took a huge risk in writing this and burning bridges with his bosses and coworkers. But in doing so, he unlocked the universal hidden language that food and hospitality workers share.
As a former hostess/waitress myself who spent most of her college years with a part-time job at IHOP and the Golden Waffle, I could relate to a lot of what Bourdain experienced working in NYC, especially with minority groups and how they were treated during that time. He was a huge inspiration to a lot of people, including me.
THE CLASSIC BESTSELLER: 'The greatest book about food ever written'
'A compelling book with its intriguing mix of clever writing and kitchen patois ... more horrifically gripping than a Stephen King novel' Sunday Times
'Extraordinary ... written with a clarity and a clear-eyed wit to put the professional food-writing fraternity to shame' Observer
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After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decided to tell all - and he meant all.
From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown;…
When Jennifer Shea married Russel Redmond, they made a decision to spend their honeymoon at sea, sailing in Mexico. The voyage tested their new relationship, not just through rocky waters and unexpected weather, but in all the ways that living on a twenty-six-foot sailboat make one reconsider what's truly important.…
I’m an aspiring foodie and a huge lover of books with a great food subplot (or main plot!). I’ve been known to read cookbooks for fun and probably the most thumbed book in our house is my copy of The Joy of Cooking. I’m a firm believer in reading books at the lunch table and that no book should be read without a cup of coffee and a cookie (at the minimum) near one’s elbow. Hopefully you find these books to be as drool-worthy as I did!
This fun and heartwarming rom-com by Bethany Turner features a pair of chefs on a cooking show.
An enemies-to-lovers trope where food is the third party in the relationship? Yes, please! I will binge-watch Chopped, The Great British Baking Show, and America’s Test Kitchen all day long. Bethany Turner gave me those vibes and more with this delightful dish.
Celebrity chef Maxwell Cavanagh is known for many things: his multiple Michelin stars, his top-rated Culinary Channel show To the Max, and most of all his horrible temper. Hadley Beckett, host of the Culinary Channel's other top-rated show, At Home with Hadley, is beloved for her Southern charm and for making her viewers feel like family.
When Max experiences a very public temper tantrum, he's sent packing to get his life in order. When he returns, career in shambles, his only chance to get back on TV and in the public's good graces is to work alongside Hadley.
I love reading, partly because I believe in the power of books to feed curiosity, promoting understanding, inclusivity, and belonging. While growing up, my favorite books didn’t have anyone that looked like me. Through reading diverse books to my kids, I realized I’d missed out on this meaningful experience as a child. Even more, I wanted my son, who has bilateral cochlear implants, to be able to read a picture book with a main character with cochlear implants. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as, in unique ways, they all celebrate curiosity about our differences.
Food can be a signal of our differences and bring us together. Chef Roy Choi is ethnically Korean (like me!) and believes food can represent love and culture.
It’s a treat to see his story illustrated by renowned graffiti artist Man One and read about how Chef Choi merges different cultures to create street food that is unique and appealing. As a bonus, the book has interspersed Korean words with their definitions!
AWARD WINNING PICTURE BOOK BIOGRAPHY OF THE CHEF WHO KICKSTARTED THE FOOD TRUCK MOVEMENT. Chef Roy Choi calls himself a “street cook.” He wants outsiders, low-riders, kids, teens, shufflers and skateboarders, to have food cooked with care, with love, with sohn maash.
"Sohn maash" is the flavors in our fingertips. It is the love and cooking talent that Korean mothers and grandmothers mix into their handmade foods. For Chef Roy Choi, food means love. It also means culture, not only of Korea where he was born, but the many cultures that make up the streets of Los Angeles, where he…
World War 2 has always interested me and my curiosity was strengthened a few years ago when my mother told me I was born illegitimate and my father had been the civil engineer building a nearby bomber airfield and a lodger with her parents. She was ashamed of what happened and lost contact with my father before I was born. Consequently, I wrote my first novel Unplanned. I then met the daughter of the Berlin mother in Abandoned in Berlin, and found itnatural to pursue this story, given what I had discovered about my own upbringing. The effort has taught me to seek to forgive but never to forget.
This is a story about the best-selling Viennese cookbook that was stolen by the Nazis and republished under someone else’s name during the War. The text and color photographs are identical, but the names of the authors are different. The original author, Alice Urbach, who was Jewish, had her book “Aryanized” for over 80 years, even though her hands are still featured in the illustrations. It shows how respectable businesses and individuals can continue to profit from the persecution of Jews long after the Holocaust ended.
I found this a quite remarkable story that has only recently been published in English. It demonstrates the extremes to which the Nazis went to stamp out anything that was Jewish. Only in 2021 were the rights returned to the original author posthumously.
"Unputdownable . . . Urbach has also retold the tragic Holocaust story in quite unforgettable lines" A.N. Wilson
"This fascinating book, by Alice's granddaughter Karina Urbach, shines a spotlight on this lesser-known aspect of Nazi looting" The Times
"A gripping piece of 20th-century family history but also something much more original: a rare insight into the 'Aryanisation' of Jewish-authored books during the Nazi regime" Financial Times
What happened to the books that were too valuable to burn?
Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others.…
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search…
My mother was a student who divorced when I was very small. Lacking resources, we moved frequently, rarely staying anywhere for more than a few months. It has left me with an abiding sympathy for stories of outsiders trying to figure out what exactly they did to be relegated to the other side of the glass, peering in. This is why when I decided to write about werewolves, I made them wolves first and humans only very secondarily. Because my sympathy is always with the monsters.
Five thousand years after leaving the labyrinth, the Minotaur has traded in a diet of virgins for a job as a cook at a North Carolina joint called Grub’s Rib, a casually cannibalistic reference that gives a sense of Sherrill’s dark humor. His life is punctuated by problems that are both conventional (he lives in a trailer park and pines for one of Grub’s waitresses) and un- (his horns are awkward in the tight confines of kitchen and trailer, his tongue makes speech difficult, his penmanship is disastrous). What makes the Minotaur so appealing is that unlike the mortals around him who really have no excuse for cynicism, “M” clings desperately to possibility. “Even in the most tedious unending life there comes, occasionally, hope. One simply has to wait and be ready.”
Five thousand years out of the labyrinth, the Minotaur finds himself in the American South, living in a trailer park and working as a line cook at a steakhouse. No longer a devourer of human flesh, the Minotaur is a socially inept, lonely creature with very human needs. But over a two-week period, as his life dissolves into chaos, this broken and alienated immortal awakens to the possibility for happiness and to the capacity for love.
Steven Sherrill is a graduate of UNC Charlotte and holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The recipient of a NEA…
