The best kind of restaurant cookbook

Nick Curtola's Four Horsemen is my new essential kitchen staple

Here are some things I’ve cooked lately:

• An indulgent steak au poivre with green peppercorns

• Whipped ricotta toast with anchovies

• A snap pea salad (they’re in season early out here in LA) with chili oil, cheddar and spiced almonds

• About eight riffs on chicory salads — some with apples, some with tahini, some in the style of puntarelle alla romana

• A celery salad with dates and grana padano

• Roasted squash with brown butter and good balsamic

• Poached chicken and rice

• Beans and broth with salmoriglio

• Roasted Dover sole with dashi, mushrooms and horseradish

• Cider glazed pork chops

• Roasted hazelnuts and good comté cheese, a new regular house snack

All of these dishes have had the same starting point. I get excited about an ingredient — pink radicchio at LA Homefarm, Dover sole at McCall’s, a craving for a bowl of beans. I check out the fridge and the pantry. And then I open up The Four Horsemen cookbook on my iPad for inspiration.

The Four Horsemen has been a staple of Williamsburg for about a decade now, with a kitchen led by

Nick Curtola

. It’s one of those restaurant and wine bars that’s always full on Resy but remains possible to slide into on any given night. I ate there late on a Friday in January and spent most of the meal muttering, “Oh my god,” to a friend as we ate oeuf mayo and veal sweetbread skewers. It’s a great spot with, I think, an even better cookbook.

I don’t follow recipes closely, but I devour them regularly and look to the good ones for guidance. Like, “What did Samin Nosrat say about kuku sabzi again?” “What’s the River Cafe technique for risotto?” And, on most days over the past few months, “What would Nick do here?”

The book came and went from any kind of cookbook hype cycle. It did not appear on the Bon Appetit, NYT or Wired best of 2024 lists. And to be fair, very few pure restaurant cookbooks did. The trendy and popular cookbooks of the moment are some combination of personality driven manifestos, hyper-specific guides and bridges toward kitchen accessibility for non-cooks. As much as we love and obsesses over restaurants, the heyday of cookbooks showing you how to accomplish what happens in these hotspot kitchens has dissipated.

That’s fine. Not every restaurant needs a cookbook. Not every chef has a story to tell or dishes that appeal to the masses. But I’ve been entranced by what Nick and his co-writer, the excellent Gabe Ulla, executed here. It has all the traits of my favorite restaurant cookbooks:

• A good, concise enough “how we built this and all the dumb things we tried before we got here” story.

• Some classic, famous dishes, with instructions on how they’re executed in the restaurant and how they can be more accessible at home.

• Personality and good guest essays.

• Not a single dish that would ever go viral or is even trying to go viral.

• Interesting little ideas for hosting, plating and cooking that get stuck in your brain across nearly every page. (Skipping a headnote or digression here would be foolish).

• A standout collection of recipes that just work and deliver.

It helps that Nick has such good taste. He likes fried snacks and encourages trying them at home. (Agreed!). He has an affinity for featuring high quality cheeses and nuts. Very little in here is ever showy but there’s always one little twist — a hint of surprise acid or spice or texture — that elevates a dish from pretty good to great. Try cooking some of this food for a dinner party and watch as people compliment your work more than you’re used to in a kind of delighted confusion.

This is great food that feels good to eat. Nick acknowledges when things are indulgent and when they’re homey. He’s realistic about where to splurge and where not to — on ingredient cost, time cost and chefy technique cost. And he has memorable little catchphrases like PJs, explained here:

I think my cooks would call this entire undertaking into question if I didn’t tell you about precious juices, or “PJs,” as they’re affectionately known in our kitchen. I wax poetic about them constantly. New hires sometimes give me a bemused look the first time they hear it. What are precious juices? Nothing more than the excess liquid you would be foolish to discard after making certain recipes. Here’s what I am referring to: If you marinate a salad of cucumbers, squid, onions, and coriander berries, they exude liquid as they sit together, and all those flavors mingle at the bottom of the bowl to form PJs—don’t leave a drop behind. The golden drippings in the pan below the rack that gorgeous chicken was just roasted on? Get that into a pot of simmering beans, or even back onto the chicken once you’ve carved it. Same goes for the macerated goodness you get from roasting stone fruits, berries, and grapes; the excess liquid left in bones slowly simmered in a stock, which you can extract with one last nudge through the colander; and the collagen from roasting Dover sole or turbot, just waiting for someone to help it emulsify with the fish’s own juices to create an extraordinarily elegant sauce.

If you’re in a cooking rut, try this book as a pick me up. It’s unlocked a daily, energized cooking habit I’ve desperately craved. And if you need a good gift (cc

Kaitlin Phillips

), I’ve found that this book makes an excellent selection for anyone from a cook to a collector, joining the pantheon of restaurant cookbooks I swear by like:

• Prune (an all-timer, untouchable)

• Bavel

• Night + Market

• River Cafe London 30

• Mister Jiu’s

• Zuni Cafe

• Sqirl