Before she ran a Michelin-starred kitchen, Iliana Regan was a farm kid in Northwest Indiana who could spot chanterelles in the family fields. Her memoir traces the road between the two.
Readical Key Points
- Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award, according to the publisher
- A memoir by the self-taught chef who founded Elizabeth, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago
- Subjects include a rural childhood, foraging and food, gender and sexuality, and work in restaurant kitchens
- Content note: addresses the author's addiction and alcoholism
- Hardcover, 250 pages, Agate Midway, 2019
The youngest of four sisters, Regan spent her childhood on a small Indiana farm picking berries and hunting chanterelles, long before she cooked for a living. In her account, people were harder to read than the land: she was a girl who wanted to be a boy, growing up gay where that was not accepted, and drinking heavily before twenty. The book follows her from a first restaurant job at fifteen, through an underground supper club, to a kitchen of her own.
Food lovers, readers of literary memoir, LGBTQ+ readers and readers of addiction memoirs are the audiences the publisher names for it. The Michelin star arrives late in the story. The farm fields come first.
About the Author
Iliana Regan is a self-taught chef. She founded the Michelin-starred restaurant Elizabeth and the pub Kitsune in Chicago, and Milkweed Inn in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. A James Beard Award and Jean Banchet Award nominee, she was named one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs in 2016.
Condition: Brand New and Readical Ready.
Readical™ is an independent bookstore and reading-products brand built around a simple idea: books matter most when what we learn leaves the page and enters our lives.
Apply the Page. Get Readical™.
