by Sheri Castle

illustrations by Yuki Murayama

I’ve had the good fortune to be a ghostwriter on a handful of restaurant cookbooks.

They’re different from other cookbooks, even from chef cookbooks. Restaurant cookbooks are about places and experiences. They aim to evoke what it’s like to be in that specific spot and eat the food the restaurant serves to paying guests. But they must also go on to inspire and enable readers to recreate convincing facsimiles of those dishes in their homes, to reproduce key aspects of the experience.

There’s the rub. Eating in a restaurant is the antithesis of cooking at home.

The common denominator among restaurant experiences is that that the diners do not cook the food. That’s true whether we’re receiving a paper sack from a drive-through window or following a maître d’ to a tony table we took great pains to reserve weeks in advance, perhaps accepting any open slot between the hours of 4 p.m. and midnight, preferably in our lifetime.

As customers, no matter the type of restaurant, we are recipients, not service providers. We do not shop, chop, stir, or wash up. There’s no need to know anything about how the food is prepared to be qualified to eat it. Yet the premise and implied promise of a restaurant cookbook is that an amateur cook (nay, any reader) in a home setting, armed with nothing more than the cookbook, can reliably reproduce the work of a professional chef with a trained staff in a restaurant kitchen. That’s a big ask. Sometimes it’s crazy talk.

The defining essence of some restaurants is to present a dining experience that can never be replicated outside that one venue. Beyond that, some restaurants intentionally won’t reveal how they make their magic. “Cookbooks” from those places can be gorgeous paeans to their culinary artistry and creative genius, but they are better suited to the coffee table than the kitchen counter.

Nonetheless, as a hired-gun, I endeavor to write an engaging and serviceable cookbook that does right by both the restaurant and the reader. My role is to be an interpreter. I must figure out how the pros in the kitchen make a dish—and, sometimes, how servers present it—and then explain how nonprofessionals might do all those things in smaller kitchens singlehandedly, all without compromising the spirit and integrity of the dish.

Restaurants have recipes, but they’re not recipes just anyone can follow. Chefs and professional cooks keep knowledge in their brains and tricks up their sleeves, but their trade is cooking, not writing. They don’t realize what they’re not telling us. For example, they instinctively season with salt at every step, but they almost never tell us that. They use the cryptic phrase “toss, toss, toss” to convey any and all methods of combining ingredients.

Notes typically amount to a few key words and sketches jotted in a Moleskine, a shorthand that might make sense to a kitchen colleague, or perhaps only to them. I once received a “recipe” from a glorious chef where the only words on the page were a few ingredients with no amounts or adjectives, similar to a jotted grocery list, and the cryptic instruction to BUST RC. It took some work to suss out that I was supposed to pulverize (or bust up) the ingredients in a food processor, which in his kitchen was a commercial brand known as a Robot Coupe. OK, then.

Only after I understand the interplay of all those factors can I begin to explain a restaurant dish within the framework of a recipe. That’s why I always develop and test restaurant recipes outside of the restaurant. I usually work in my own modest kitchen, outfitted with a thirty-inch induction range with a single oven, a small countertop oven, a few feet of counter space, and a standard household fridge that must somehow hold all the cookbook testing ingredients—plus provisions for my real life and family. It’s not shabby, but it’s no showcase.

On one out-of-state project, I rented an Airbnb near the restaurant because of this belief that recipes for home cooks should emerge from home kitchens, or something close to them. Once, I used the makeshift kitchen in the employee break room, hidden from view at a gorgeous resort. The chefs worked on La Cornue while I used an outdated enameled Whirlpool with four wonky electric-coil eyes and one slightly warped oven rack, by choice. Essential truths emerged in both kitchens.

Cookbook recipes spell out ingredients, but restaurants often have access to ingredients and suppliers that home cooks do not. With online shopping, obscure spices and grains aren’t the hurdle they once were. Still, when a cookbook breezily suggests you ask your supermarket butcher for rabbit or assumes you had the foresight to plant lovage on a sunny sill last spring, I roll my eyes just like you do. When an ingredient isn’t available to mere mortals in the real world, I must come up with a reasonable substitution, such as celery leaves in place of lovage. When a particular purveyor or brand is essential to the restaurant’s cuisine, I make sure to provide a source list.

I also have to address scale and proportion. Most restaurants deal in far larger quantities than needed for most home meals. My job is to cut things down to size, which is more involved than simply pulling out a calculator and doing division. I once got a recipe for chicken salad that called for one chicken breast and four quarts of pesto, which felt suspect. Another time, the only unit of measurement for ingredients was expressed as fractions or multiples of “sour creams,” as in one-half sour cream of milk or two sour creams of chopped onions. Turns out the restaurant’s prep cooks used leftover commercial sour cream cartons to measure and store ingredients.

Yet another time, a chef sent a recipe (by which I mean a texted photo) for a composed salad garnished with tiny dots and whimsical dabs of several homemade condiments, a siphoned shot of foam, and something like two tail feathers from exotic birds. When I asked for clarification, the sous chef sent recipes for each item, but they yielded bucketfuls and started with phrases such as, “On day one.” In the end, we settled on a few fat drops of olive oil and some flaky salt.

I believe the secret to describing useful techniques is to use no more, but no fewer, words than necessary. It’s a high-stakes game of Jenga where I pull out as much as possible without the whole thing crashing down. I try to explain just enough to get the job done without dumbing down the recipe or condescending to home cooks, who can be quite talented and experienced. But it’s equally true that the clearest and most complete recipe ever written won’t produce a satisfactory result if the reader knows nothing about cooking or is unwilling to follow the recipe. Good recipes are like a GPS device: They can provide a route to where we want to go, but they can’t teach us to drive.

When a restaurant cookbook is done right, every spoonful and sentence should taste and sound like they came straight from the restaurant, rather than from me. I must think about everything but not share my personal thoughts. I must prepare every recipe with care, including dishes I would never order myself. I’m not a character in their story. A ghostwriter is the silent spokesperson for the restaurant and advocate for the reader, the invisible double agent with everyone’s best interests in mind.

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