Steal the Menu A Memoir of Forty Years in Food

Part autobiography, part culinary history, Steal the Menu is former New York Times food editor Raymond Sokolov’s account of four decades of eating. From his pathbreaking dispatches on nouvelle cuisine in France to finding top-notch Chinese dishes at a New Jersey gas station to picking the brain of the most Michelin-starred chef in the world, Sokolov captures the colorful characters and mouth watering meals that define food today. Throughout, he shares a lifetime of  personal anecdotes, including infuriating President Nixon’s daughter over a wedding cake, as well as prescient observations on one of the most tumultuous—and exciting—periods in gastronomic history.

Raymond Sokolov ate his first meal in Detroit in 1941 and dined with tenacious curiosity in France as a correspondent for Newsweek. He went on to sustain himself writing about food at The New York Times and Natural History magazine, and, most recently, by covering restaurants worldwide for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Saucier’s Apprentice, the novel Native Intelligence, and a biography of A. J. Liebling, Wayward Reporter. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.