Nach Waxman is wearing a baseball hat decorated with the diamond shaped Avery Island Tabasco logo as he takes Gothamist around the stacks at Kitchen Arts and Letters, his 23 year-old Upper East Side bookshop. He is talking about Rachael Ray. “It’s a funny story,” says Waxman, describing his first impressions of the current Triscuit box doyenne. He shakes his head and laughs. “Nobody here had heard of her. We didn’t carry her books. Now that we do, we don’t sell them.” Nach (pronounced knock) Waxman doesn’t mind, but Gothamist thinks that maybe he could use the shelf space --Kitchen Arts and Letters is a very small store.
“We sell ten Alain Ducasse for every one Rachael Ray,” continues Waxman. Like it or not, it is this kind of statement that restores many a chef’s faith in their trade, and humanity in general. “Our breadth is half the fun,” Waxman says, thumbing some of his titles in the shop’s New Releases section. At the counter, a repeat customer pays and stumbles out the door with a heavy armful of French and Japanese language books. He has just told Rien Fratell, the clerk behind the counter, that he doesn’t read either language. But foreign words and metric conversions don’t stop customers from buying the books at Kitchen Arts and Letters; some even pick up food-related translation dictionaries, which the shop also sells. “We have no real boundaries,” says Waxman. “If it’s not published in the United States, we’ll bring it in.” In keeping with their namesake, Borders bookstores don’t really do this, but at Kitchen Arts and Letters, imported books make up almost half of all sales.
“If there’s one thing,” says Waxman, “it’s that we hate to be regarded as a cookbook store.” Some of the most chef-requested books at Kitchen Arts and Letters, like Pierre Gagnaire’s Reflections on Culinary Artistry, don’t even come with recipes. The book is filled with moody, backlit glamour shots of fennel, radishes, and tips on how to seduce farm vegetables; but contains no real recipes to speak of. This hasn’t stopped Gagnaire’s book from becoming a kind of crib sheet for many chefs since it was first published in 2003, inspiring all kind of smudged sauces and asymmetrical plate presentations since.
It is Pierre Gagnaire’s first book that many Kitchen Arts and Letters customers request the most. Former most-wanteds include cult cookbooks, such as the original edition of Fergus Henderson’s offal suggestions, Nose To Tail, which is currently enjoying a paperback re-release due to Anthony Bourdain’s unwavering adulation, and his love of roasted bone marrow with parsley salad. As if Henderson’s book isn’t exhaustive on a particular organ, Waxman shows Gothamist a French volume of recipes and history called Testicules, by Blandine Vie (note: English language version coming soon, hopefully). Esoteric or not, Waxman searches the bibliosphere for any food book he does not have in stock, and sends out a new titles list quarterly to customers.
Additionally, Waxman keeps a multivolume “card catalog” of all special requests in a back office the size of a walk-in closet: these are mostly for prized or sought after books, or out-of-print classics. Every customer request is hand-written on an index card. Up front, Nach Waxman reaches behind the counter and shows Gothamist a couple of days’ worth of special requests: a stack of about forty cards, held together with a rubber band.
In the meantime, the scope of titles at Kitchen Arts and Letters is unrivaled. A smattering of academic books with titles like Dinner for Dickens in one section; a fistful of cannibalism books shelved below. Do you need a copy of Roman Food Poems, by Alistair Elliot? How about Betel-Chewing Equipment of East New Guinea?
“That’s not the only Betel Nut book we’ve had,” says Waxman quietly.
Waxman does in fact carry cookbooks; mixed in with the latest coffee table tomes are museum pieces: cookbooks from restaurants gone and forgotten, lost gems turned into Outback steakhouses and condos. In the soup section there’s Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking, by the aptly named Brother Rick Curry. Medieval Arab Cookery is shelved just a few feet away from Amy Sedaris’ über-hostess omnibus I Like You, which pointedly instructs readers to stew green beans with salt pork and bacon until “they’re the color of a green army jacket.” On the display table is Kaiseki, by the Japanese Chef Yoshihiro Murata, with one-two punch forwards penned by Ferran Adria and Nobu Matsuhisa. “We just sold out of Hydrocolloids for the fifth time,” says Waxman, referring to the food chemistry textbook that has been co-opted by xanthan gum toting chefs in the good fight to build a better lychee bubbles.
Kitchen Arts and Letters is the place for food books that are barely a blip on the Barnes and Noble radar, but it’s also a good barometer to determine where chefs will go next with their menus. Before anything ever comes a boil in the food world and makes headlines, it’s a sure bet that it can be found simmering at Kitchen Arts and Letters. Fratell estimates that “over 1000” copies of Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking were sold before the book was recently famously reprinted a few years ago, long before the phrase Molecular Gastronomy was ever uttered on basic cable. Waxman’s shop is also one of the only places in New York that sells every edition of Ferran Adria’s year-by-year El Bulli retrospective, a year-by-year chronicle of the iconoclastic San Sebastian restaurant. Put together, the oversized books have a combined weight of more than 25 pounds.
“We’ve been here since the fall of 1983,” says Waxman, who has also inspired a few generations of both professional chefs and serious home cooks. Kitchen Arts and Letters may have moved in and out of a few physical spaces along Lexington since then, but the shop, as it were, remains the same. “What we do here is not some kind of attempt to show off,” Waxman says, “it’s a constant working through of what we do in kitchens, at tables, in our cultures and biographies. How we eat penetrates all aspects of our sociology and anthropology.”
Kitchen Arts and Letters has always been tiny on the inside. While in-store special events are not a possibility, both hometown and visiting chefs will stop in to sign copies of their books on Waxman’s shelves. It’s a form of gratitude, without hovering PR people and cross-promotional handouts of Triscuits, for the most comprehensive shop of its kind in Manhattan.
Kitchen Arts and Letters
1435 Lexington Avenue
212.876.5550 (tel)
212.876.3584 (fax)
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