Serious Eater Is Officially on Shelves Now!

I can’t believe it! The moment of truth has finally arrived. This week saw the official publication of my new book, Serious Eater: A Food Lover’s Perilous Quest For Pizza and Redemption.

It's a weird moment when your book, particularly a very personal book like this one, suddenly officially appears in people's lives. Serious Eater recounts plenty of things I’m proud of, but it’s always nerve-racking to put your life on display, warts and all. This book is decidedly different from anything I've written before, and it's definitely not another iteration of my lifelong search for the best hamburger, slice of pizza, or hot dog.

So what will you read about in Serious Eater? For starters, you'll get the full behind-the-scenes, never-before-told Serious Eats origin story. But the book also tells the very individual, human story of how I crafted my dream job out of ambition and thin air—and exactly what it cost me. Let’s just say I had no idea what I was in for when I decided to spend a hundred bucks to start a food blog and somehow convinced myself and my investors that I could make a business out of it.

Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption

$16.27from Amazon

What followed was a wild ride. There were plenty of highs—building an international readership that numbers in the millions; discovering talented, creative writers and cooks like Kenji Lopez-Alt, Stella Parks, and Daniel Gritzer; and finding that my passionate, discerning, and inclusive point of view about food was shared by so many others.

But the lows were no less extreme. The book recounts what it meant to learn that my original partners didn’t have my best interests at heart. And it follows the exhausting, discouraging quest for funding to keep the website afloat, an undertaking so consuming that it put my marriage, career, and relationships with family and friends at risk.

Long story short, if you love Serious Eats, I truly believe you’ll love Serious Eater (or, at the very least, the exclusive bonus recipes from Kenji and Stella contained within its pages). But don’t just take my word for it—check out Kenji’s foreword to the book, or read the Washington Post’s recent review for a less biased take.

You can pick up a copy in your local bookstore or online. And, if you want to meet me and Kenji in person, we’d love to see you at one of the stops on our West Coast tour. I’ll also be doing events in Boston, New York City, and Martha’s Vineyard. Click here to see when and where I’m headed on this summer's tour. And, for those of you in NYC, you're cordially invited to join me and Danny Meyer at Rizzoli for a live taping of my podcast, Special Sauce. Hope to see you there!

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