Eating Their Words : Forget about the recipes; chefs’ cookbooks are now required reading for restaurant-goers

Once upon a time, chefs were people who cooked food in restaurants. That, of course, was before the great cookbook boom. Now, chefs are people who write books about the food that they cook in their restaurants.

This is a great boon to restaurant-goers. For these books give you more than mere recipes. A restaurant, after all, is more than merely a place to eat; design and philosophy have become an integral part of every eating establishment, and each has become a little universe of its own. In the same way, cookbooks have become platforms for the chefs who write them. If you really want to know all about a restaurant, you no longer need to go to guidebooks. The cookbook will tell you everything you need to know.

City Cuisine by Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, William Morrow. $19.95.

City Restaurant is the archetypal Los Angeles restaurant. It’s the place I’d take a first-time visitor to this particular city, a place that probably wouldn’t be successful in any other city in America. It is a bold, spare modern space where robust food is served on colorful, angular plates.

The book, like the restaurant, is an original: spare, modern and colorful. And all the restaurant’s recipes are here, from spicy poona pancakes to rich City chocolate. Chef-owners Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken augmented their classical French training with stints in the kitchens of the world; the result is that they pay as much respect to the food of India, Mexico and Thailand as they do to that of Europe. It’s a completely eclectic cuisine, and if you enjoy eating at the restaurant, you’ll enjoy the book.

One bonus: the authors have a casual, conversational style, and the comments on each recipe make you feel as if the chefs were standing at your elbow. The difference is that if you were actually at the restaurant, it would be so noisy that you probably wouldn’t be able to hear them.

Michael’s Cookbook by Michael McCarty, Macmillan, $29.95.

If you like Michael’s the Restaurant, you’ll like Michael’s the Cookbook. It’s got a lot of the classy art that’s in the restaurant. It’s got virtually every dish you’ve ever eaten in the restaurant, all photographed in living color. (And I mean all, which often becomes slightly ridiculous. Do we really need to see three nearly indistinguishable photographs of grilled duck breast with Grand Marnier and orange, grilled duck breast with currants, and grilled duck breast with figs and port?)

Most interesting recipe? The one for pommes frites, whose ingredients, in toto, are as follows: rendered beef suet or vegetable oil for deep-frying, 3 pounds frozen french fries, salt. Michael even admits that the secret ingredient in his blueberry pancakes is Bisquick.

But what Michael’s cookbook most shares with Michael’s restaurant is attitude. Forget about the recipes and read the introduction to the book; if it appeals to you, there’s a table with your name on it waiting in Santa Monica. And you’ll be glad to know that the restaurant just lowered its prices.

Supper Club Chez Martha Rose, Atheneum, $24.95.

Martha Rose Shulman (she is the daughter of the late author Max Shulman, who invented Dobie Gillis), has created the ultimate small restaurant: all her guests are friends. They gather one Thursday a month for dinner in her flower-bedecked Left Bank Paris apartment for what sounds like great conversation. Dinner costs about $35, and after you’ve read her book, you’ll want to know how you can join the club.

Shulman’s friends get together to eat meatless menus that seem fairly simple to cook. They sound delicious, but it’s the ambiance you’ll hunger for: if you’re one of those people who reads books by expatriate Americans who lived in Paris in the ‘20s and feels that you were born too late, this book will make you want to leap onto the next plane to Paris.

A Tuscan in the Kitchen by Pino Luongo, Clarkson N. Potter, $24.95.

I was wary of Le Madri, one of New York’s hottest new restaurants. Owner Pino Luongo had garnered a great deal of press by simply importing Italian mothers to cook in his kitchen. It sounded like a rather silly gimmick.

Then I picked up this cookbook. It’s one of the loveliest I’ve ever seen, filled with spectacular pictures, great stories and recipes that sound wonderful but give you no measurements at all. It is all slightly eccentric; it made me want to go to the restaurant.

Le Madri is as beautiful as the book: a large, serene room that somehow manages to be both friendly and dignified. It looks like a little pocket of Tuscany transported to a New York corner. The food I ate there was a delight: I especially liked a white pizza that looked like golden lace with little sprinkles of parsley on the top. This crisp crust had been split in half and filled with mild white cheese that was warmed until it melted. It was one of the nicest things I can remember eating. That recipe’s not in the book, but you will find recipes for most of the appetizers that sit on the big table at the restaurant’s entrance, enticing you to come in.

Chez Panisse Cooking by Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters, Random House, $24.95.

Chez Panisse is a restaurant that is almost 20 years old. Is it still a place on the cutting edge of cooking? Do you really want to eat there?

After reading this book, the answer is an emphatic yes. I don’t think there’s a dish in the book that I’m not eager to eat.

But it is the tone of the book that is most impressive. It is serious and passionate at the same time, with an underlying argument that keeps insisting that the reader pay attention to the quality of life. The people at Chez Panisse believe that food is important: it is that attitude that has made it such a seminal restaurant.

This book, written primarily by chef Paul Bertolli, is quite different than Alice Waters’ first Chez Panisse cookbook, which came out in 1982. This one is a larger, denser book that has a certain maturity. The earthy hand-tinted photographs by Gail Skoff reinforce the message; are not proper pictures of finished dishes, they are little works of art that remind you where food came from in the first place. These photos are among the most memorable-- and surprising-- that you’ve ever seen in a cookbook.

Secret Ingredients by Michael Roberts, Bantam Books, $19.95.

“A secret ingredient is one that mysteriously improves the flavor of a dish without calling attention to itself. It’s either undetectable or extremely suble. But its presence is crucial because the dish would not be nearly as good without it.”

Roberts, the chef/owner of Trumps restaurants, has filled his book with sly secrets. It is also filled with subtle surprises which start when you crack the cover and discover that the pages are printed in blue. Written with wit, humor and remarkable good sense, the book is exactly what you’d expect from a chef whose stunningly modern restaurant combines a continually surprising menu (who else serves caviar with plantains and black beans?) with almost unfailingly courteous service. Reading the book makes Roberts feel like a friend; it’s such a fine introduction to Trumps that you’ll be tempted to walk in the door of the restaurant and straight into the kitchen.

Bruce Cost’s Asian Ingredients, William Morrow, $22.95.

Cost has just opened Monsoon, a new restaurant in San Francisco. Read his book, and you will instantly want to eat there.

The book is really a reference book more than a cookbook. The guide to ingredients is invaluable to all of us who are eager to identify all the strange things we see other people eating in Asian restaurants. But as you leaf through the book, reading about perilla and water caltrops and something called hair vegetable, you find yourself looking at the recipes more and more. And then you find yourself getting hungry. And then you find yourself wishing that Monsoon were down the street.

Jasper White’s Cooking From New England, Harper and Row, $27.95.

I’ve never been to Jasper White’s restaurant in Boston. But I’ve always wanted to eat there, if only because White is a close friend of Lydia Shire, a chef whose cooking I admire immensely. So I looked at this book with particular curiosity.

Now, I want to go to the restaurant more than ever. For one thing, how can you not be intrigued by a guy who begins one chapter by saying, “Without vegetables food would be pretty boring.”? For another, he writes about New England with both knowledge, humor and authority. If you want to know how to spatchcock poussin, Jasper White is your guy.

Can you tell anything about the design of a restaurant from the design of a book? I hope not--the typography here leads a lot to be desired. If White’s restaurant looks anything like his book, it’s a cluttered place where concentration is difficult.

For more about cookbooks, see today’s special Food Section.