Chasing Smoke: Cooking Over Fire Around the Levant

Although best known for their London restaurant Honey & Co., Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich also operate Honey & Smoke, a grill house featuring fire-cooked food inspired by food from Greece and Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, Israel and Jordan, and elsewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean.

If you're able to cook over live fire, you'll find that Chasing Smoke offers a refreshing expansion of the heavily published literature of food from this region. Dishes such as charred kohlrabi with radish and sesame or ash-baked beets with lentils and feta have not been presented over and over. Nor have the likes of smoked short ribs with black pepper and orange or preserved lemon fish cakes.

In frequent sidebars the authors write about cooks and places that particularly inspired them, whether they're dining spots in Alexandria recommended by a Cairo cab driver or a family restaurant in Gaziantep, Turkey. The resulting sense of place adds to the inspiration provided by this creative book.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.