August 1, 2016
The first two snacks, among the more than 100 recipes in this collection, are misleading: pimento cheese followed by deviled eggs might cause readers to think that this is another tome featuring good old Southern comfort food classics. But the James Beard Award–winning chef Christensen, owner of Poole’s and six other eateries in Raleigh, N.C., quickly reverses course, steering head-on into the wilds of modern cuisine with fried eggplant with burnt honey aioli, and turnip green fritters with whipped tahini. Dynamic flavor and texture combinations highlight the salad section, which includes tangy options such as heirloom tomatoes with crushed olives, crispy quinoa, and white anchovy dressing. The vast breadth of a diner menu perhaps explains why a standard recipe for potato latkes turns up in the vegetable chapter, though they would certainly go well as an accompaniment to the Poole’s steak, simply seasoned and served with a red wine pan sauce. Meanwhile, in his many full-color photos, Asheville photographer Johnny Autry shows a subtle appreciation for utensils: a thin knife tangential to a tomato pie, a school of seafood forks beside a bowl of mussels, and spoons and forks immersed in pork and dumplings.
November 15, 2016
Poole's Diner is James Beard Award-winning chef Christensen's flagship restaurant in Raleigh, NC. Here, Christensen empowers home cooks to reproduce the diner's best-loved dishes, including chilled corn soup with cherry tomatoes, buttermilk fried chicken with hot honey, and sweet potato hummingbird layer cake. Like Nicolaus Balla and Cortney Burns's Bar Tartine, this cookbook showcases numerous flavor-building techniques, from using aromatic herb sachets to improve a pot of beans to toasting and grinding peppercorns before adding them to pimento cheese. VERDICT Mouthwatering Southern foods beckon to readers from the pages of this attractive restaurant cookbook, which recalls other excellent titles such as Frank Stitt's Southern Table. Highly recommended.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.