TL;DR: Every chef who decides to write a book wants to write a cookbook. The cookbook is the wrong book. Recipes are a commodity, the market is saturated, and the cookbook does almost none of the work a chef needs their book to do. Here are five specific reasons the cookbook fails for working chefs, and what the book should be instead. The chefs who get this right end up with restaurants people fly in for, careers that survive their first kitchen closing, and brand equity that outlasts any given menu.
If you’re a chef or restaurateur and you’ve been thinking about writing a book, you almost certainly want to write a cookbook. Hundreds of chefs before you wanted the same thing for the same reasons. Most of them, after writing the cookbook, will tell you it didn’t do what they hoped.
I’d tell a chef the same thing I’d tell a surgeon or a coach. The book that matters is the one only you could write, and a recipe collection is the one book anybody with a test kitchen can produce.
The cookbook is often a beautiful object, with photography and design budgets that make something lovely. It’s still the wrong first book for almost every working chef who writes one.
Why is a cookbook the wrong book for a chef?
There are, by any reasonable count, more than a million cookbooks currently in print. Amazon’s cookbook category alone runs to hundreds of thousands of titles. The cookbook shelf at any decent bookstore is six feet wide and three feet deep, and that’s the small bookstore.
You aren’t going to compete in this market on recipes.Share on X
You’re not going to compete in this market on recipes. Pasta, vegetables and bread have all been done, bread forty different ways by forty different authorities. Your sourdough chapter will be the eighteenth one that reader has seen this year, and unless your name is already a Food Network brand, yours isn’t the one they’ll remember.
People whose names are already attached to something larger than the cookbook write the cookbooks that break through the commodity floor.
The cookbook is the merchandise of an existing brand. If you don’t have the brand yet, the cookbook won’t produce it. The cookbook will sit on a shelf with the other commodity titles and fail to do anything.
I don’t enjoy saying that to someone who’s spent years on a line and earned the right to be proud of their food. It beats watching them find out after the photography bills come in.
Reason two: Recipes don’t sell restaurants
Start with the question every chef has to answer: what’s the book for?
If it’s a marketing asset for the restaurant, the cookbook works against you. Once the customer can make your dishes at home, they have fewer reasons to come to the restaurant. The cookbook lowers the barrier between the customer and the experience, the opposite of what most restaurants need.
Restaurants compete on experience, atmosphere, the human exchange of being cooked for by a professional, and the food. The food is only part of it. The cookbook strips away everything except the food and hands the customer a worse version of it, because home kitchens aren’t commercial kitchens. The customer’s home reproduction of your signature dish doesn’t add to their memory of the restaurant. It often replaces it with something less.
The marketing asset a restaurant needs is the book that makes the restaurant more interesting to dine at.
The cookbook lowers the barrier between the customer and the experience, the opposite of what most restaurants need.
The cookbook does the opposite and makes it less necessary. Write about how the restaurant was built. Its philosophy. Where the ingredients come from. What the team is like. What it’s like to eat there on a Tuesday. That’s the book that brings reservations. Not a recipe collection.
Reason three: The cookbook expires
The cookbook is tied to a moment. Your menu changes. The seasonality changes. The team changes. The restaurant evolves. The cookbook captures a snapshot of one year of cooking and then dates immediately as the kitchen moves on.
Five years after publication, the cookbook describes a restaurant that no longer exists in that form. The customer who picks it up wonders whether you still make anything in it. The chef who wrote it has moved on to other projects, other restaurants, other techniques, and the book is left behind as a record of somebody they used to be.
The right book doesn’t have this expiration problem. A memoir of a cooking life ages well. A book of philosophy and leadership doesn’t go out of date the way recipes do. A book about how the restaurant industry works keeps being read as long as the industry exists. The cookbook, by contrast, gets remaindered.
What is a chef’s real asset for a book?
What does a working chef know that the general reader doesn’t? Recipes are the smallest, most public part of it. The recipes can be Googled. The information that’s locked up inside a working chef’s head is much more interesting than the recipes and far harder to find anywhere else.
What it’s like to manage a kitchen line during service. How to source ingredients that aren’t on any commercial supplier’s list.
The leadership a brigade responds to. The psychology of a dining room when everything goes wrong at 8:15 on a Saturday. The relationship between cost and quality and what gets traded when you compromise either one. The way the food world has changed in the last twenty years and where it’s going. The economics of restaurants. Most diners don’t understand them, and almost no cookbook explains them.
This is the material I go digging for. In every interview I push for the failures and the bad nights, because readers want to know what went wrong and how someone came back from it. A chef has more of those stories than almost anybody, and none of them fit between an ingredient list and a method.
None of that’s in a cookbook. All of it’s in the chef. The book that captures it is the one the chef has standing to write and nobody else does, and the cookbook throws all of it away to publish recipes the reader could have found in any other cookbook.
Reason five: The cookbook doesn’t survive the chef’s career arc
Most restaurant careers don’t end with the chef still at the restaurant they’re known for. Restaurants close.
Chefs move. Concepts change. The cookbook attached to a single restaurant has a hard time outliving the restaurant. The chef who wrote it ends up explaining the book at every later stage of their career, and the explanation is awkward because the cookbook is so tightly tied to a place that no longer exists.
The book that travels with the chef is the book about the chef.
A book about how the chef thinks, what they’ve learned, what they believe about food and cooking and the industry, follows the chef wherever they go next. It supports the next restaurant, the next concept, the next consulting engagement, the next teaching gig, the next television project. The cookbook does none of that. It’s tied to one address.
Chefs who tell me they can’t write are in good company. Clients say it to me all the time, and I tell them that’s why people hire a ghostwriter. Plenty of the people who hire me have limited written English or none at all, and that’s one of the main reasons they call. A chef’s job is to know the kitchen. Getting it onto the page is mine.
What should a chef’s book be instead of a cookbook?
For most working chefs and restaurateurs, the book that works is one of three categories.
The cooking memoir is your story: how you got into this, the kitchens you came up in, the mentors who shaped you, the disasters and the good nights. The model is whichever chef memoirs stayed with you, whether that’s Anthony Bourdain, Gabrielle Hamilton or Marco Pierre White. A memoir makes the chef a person the reader knows, and a reader who knows the chef wants to eat that chef’s food in that chef’s restaurant.
The kitchen leadership book. What you’ve learned about running a kitchen, managing people, building a culture, training a team, surviving the brutality of the industry. Restaurants are notoriously difficult environments, and the leadership lessons learned in a serious kitchen translate to other industries in ways most chefs underestimate. This book has a business-book readership in addition to a food readership. That expands the audience significantly. Other high-pressure professions face the same kind of leadership challenges and the chef who has thought clearly about them has a book worth writing.
The food philosophy book. What you believe about cooking, eating, sourcing, sustainability, the role of restaurants in a community, and how all of it should change. The strongest food writing in recent decades, from Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman to Samin Nosrat, has been philosophical. The chef who has a clear philosophy and articulates it well becomes the voice the reader trusts, and trust is what restaurants survive on.
Any one of these three categories produces a book that builds the chef as well as the kitchen. Any combination of them works too. The cookbook can come later, after the real book builds the brand, when the cookbook is the merchandise instead of the marketing.
What this costs you to get wrong
The cookbook is expensive to produce. Photography alone runs into five figures. Recipe testing takes months. The publisher’s advance, if you get one, often doesn’t cover the production costs. The chef ends up subsidizing the book out of pocket and then watches it underperform commercially.
I don’t recommend traditional publishing to my clients, and the cookbook world shows why.
Three of my clients’ books went to traditional publishers, and each one took twelve to eighteen months to come out. The royalties are much lower, and the author gives up control of the book. A chef who self-publishes the right book keeps the timeline and keeps the final say over what’s in it.
The 2024 study on business book ROI from Amplify, Gotham Ghostwriters, Smith Publicity, and Thought Leadership Leverage surveyed 301 business authors and found median ghostwritten book revenue of $92,500 and four-times-higher profitability than other books. AuthorROI.com has the data. Most working chefs who write cookbooks lose money on them. Most working chefs who write the right book in one of the three categories above make it back many times.
My take
Recipes are a commodity, and a cookbook is an expensive way to prove it. Write the book that makes readers know you, a memoir, a kitchen leadership book or a food philosophy. A book like that fills tables, and it keeps selling after a kitchen closes. Save the cookbook for later, as merchandise once the brand exists. I’d self-publish the real book, since traditional houses take a year or more, pay lower royalties and take away your control.
What to do this week
If you’re a chef or restaurateur and you’ve been planning a cookbook, the conversation to have is about which version of the actual right book serves your career, your restaurant, and the brand you want to build over the next decade. The cookbook may still happen eventually. It shouldn’t be the first book.
The Book Discovery Intensive is built to work that out before any writing begins. The conversation lasts about ten hours of working sessions, and by the end you have a clear picture of what the book should be, who it’s for, and how it fits into the rest of your career. Book the call if that’s useful. The case studies page has examples of how this has gone for other professionals.
It makes me a little crazy to watch a talented chef pour a year and a pile of savings into a cookbook that says nothing about what they know. The memoir, the leadership book and the philosophy book are the ones still selling fifteen years later, and they’re the ones careers get built on. Write one of those first and put the cookbook off until people already know your name.
Chefs with a story to tell can get the book written by a professional. The Ghostwriting Advantage is my book on how to get your book written for you, drawn from 54+ books I’ve ghostwritten.
Frequently Asked Questions
- A Comprehensive Study of Business Book ROI, Gotham Ghostwriters, Amplify Publishing Group, Smith Publicity, Thought Leadership Leverage, with Josh Bernoff
