The title is an argument disguised as a shrug. Greg Baxtrom, the chef behind Brooklyn’s Olmsted, has decided that most of what fine dining asks of you — the hyperspecificity, the rigidity, the performance of difficulty — does not actually make food taste better. So he has written a cookbook that throws it overboard.
Seventy-five recipes, arranged from easy to complex, with sidebars on recovering from mistakes. The simple ribeye with roasted root vegetables. The mac and cheese that earns its name. The bouillabaisse that looks ambitious but arrives with enough guidance to make it approachable.
Where David Chang’s cookbooks carry the energy of a chef who wants to change how you think about food, Baxtrom wants to change how you feel about cooking it. The difference matters. Chang electrifies. Baxtrom encourages.
The book has the quality of a good friend who happens to have a Michelin-starred restaurant explaining, with genuine enthusiasm, that you can get ninety per cent of the way there with a fraction of the effort.
