This was a delightful and refreshing read. The recipes somehow manage to make restaurant-quality dishes manageable for the home cook; they combine easy-to-find ingredients in unusual ways (Avocado and Dark Chocolate Souffle! Beets with Lavender and Crushed Blackberries!), and most of the techniques are pretty low-maintenance. I loved the illustrations--for each recipe, the chef/writer has created a fabulously abstract, evocative collage! A truly unusual cookbook.

This one popped on my radar mostly because of the Chef’s Table episode featuring Passard last season. His changeover from a meat driven to vegetable driven restaurant fascinated me, as it’s the direction I’ve taken a lot of my own cooking. I was looking forward to an intriguing story that laid bare the soul searching, the agonizing, the back and forthing, that one would think accompanied such a switch at a highly regarded, Michelin starred restaurant.

But it was not to be. In a sense, it’s not fair of me, because there was no indication that this book would have been that. It’s not touted as a chef autobiography, nor the story of his restaurant, L’Arpège. So I can’t fairly hold it to my expectations, and have to judge it on what it is. It’s a recipe book. There’s little in the way of narrative, there’s no story to bite into. It’s a collection of recipes for interesting and creative ways to use vegetables in your cooking. On that basis, it’s a well written, useful cookbook, and I can’t fault it.