Chef John Besh Book Signing at EJGH

Join us at our gift shop, the Sunshine Boutique, on Tuesday, September 21st from 11 am – 1 pm for a special book signing with Chef John Besh. He will be signing his cookbook, My New Orleans: The Cookbook. The book will be available to purchase in the gift shop.

My New Orleans chef John Besh will change the way you look at New Orleans cooking and the way you see World-famous chef John Besh. It’s 16 chapters of culture, history, essay and insight, and pure goodness. Besh tells us the story of his New Orleans by the season and by the dish. Archival, four-color, location photography along ingredient information make the Big Easy easy to tackle in home kitchens. Cooks will salivate over the 200 recipes that honor and celebrate everything in New Orleans.

Bite by bite John Besh brings us New Orleans cooking as we’ve never tasted before. It’s the perfect blend of contemporary French techniques with indigenous Southern Louisiana products and know-how. His amazing new offering is exclusively brought to fans and foodies everywhere by Andrews McMeel.

From Mardi Gras to the shrimp season, to the urban garden, to gumbo weather, Boucherie (the season of the pig), and everything tasty in between, Besh gives a sampling of New Orleans that will have us all craving for more.

The boy from the Bayou isn’t just an acclaimed chef with an exceptional pallet. Besh is a chef with a heart. The ex-marine passion for Crescent City, its people, and its livelihood are the main courses making him a leader of the city’s culinary recovery and resilience after the wrath of Hurricane Katrina.

An Introduction to My New Orleans from John Besh

This book is the story of a dreamy, starry-eyed boy brought up in the shadows of New Orleans, surrounded by cypress knees and tupelo trees, good dinners, and great friends. My life has been dramatically shaped by our multicultural heritage. Everything that I cook and eat, see and smell, reminds me of where I come from and more or less dictates where I’m going.

I grew up in Slidell, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. My childhood revolved around the lake, and I spent many hours shrimping in its waters and fishing along its shores. I learned to cook from my mom and my grandmother, and from the men I hunted with, who held that if you hunt it and kill it, a boy like me had better know how to clean it and cook it. Ours was a house of great food–we celebrated everything from births to deaths around great food. My ideas of New Orleans’s cooking come directly from the New Orleans table. My cooking draws on decades of learning and mastering cooking techniques that I felt certain would help me years down the road. I restlessly search my mind’s catalog of everything I’ve ever tasted or cooked, so that when I see a tomato at its ripest state, my mind runs through literally thousands of preparations that could work for this here tomato. Some people may look up in the sky and notice a mallard duck, but I see a slow-roasted duckling with lots of hearty herbs, cooked down in gravy and served over rice.

My goal in launching Restaurant August in 2001 was to have a world-class place that could compete with the great restaurants of New Orleans. But Katrina, of course, changed everything. When the aftermath of that devastating storm threatened our fishermen and farmers, our shrimpers and oystermen, it seemed urgent to help preserve and protect our unique culinary heritage, its local ingredients, and its authentic culture.

After Katrina, being from New Orleans became the focus of my identity. The truth is I am from here and I cook from here–our ingredients and our traditions. I believe our city is a true national treasure: We have one of the few native urban cultures–and cuisines—that still thrives in this country. I cook New Orleans food my way, revering each ingredient as it reaches the ripeness of its season, which is how My New Orleans: The Cookbook unfolds, from Crawfish to Reveillon. No other place on earth is like New Orleans. Welcome to the flavors of my home.

John Besh