Today's Special Cookbook Review

Today's Special: 20 Leading Chefs Choose 100 Emerging Chefs

In this week's cookbook review, we decided to bring you Today's Special Cookbook.

The international dining scene is a vast, ever-shifting landscape, and Today's Special is perfectly positioned to help you navigate it. Twenty of the globe's leading chef-curators, have selected five emerging chefs from around the world, showcasing a variety of styles of food, restaurants, and personalities. Each of the 100 selected chefs is profiled, with recipes, photographs, and menus, plus original commissioned essays that shed light on what makes a standout star in today's culinary realm.

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An Inspiring Book

Today's Special puts together a diverse list of emerging chefs from many different backgrounds. From America to Africa, Sweden to Slovenia, Chile to China, the book represents the brightest talents from all over the world. In this list, you'll find chefs with exclusive tasting menus, chefs with local bistros, and even some who are admired for their pop-ups or rolling dinner series.

This book follows the success of the bestselling Coco, a book released by Phaidon in 2009, which was an unprecedented guide to the most exceptional talent in the international restaurant world. Some of the nominated chefs in Coco are now nominators in Today's Special. For that enticing and enduring volume, then lesser-known promising chefs, including Skye Gyngell, Hugh Acheson, Alex Atala, April Bloomfield, and David Chang, were nominated years before they became the culinary superstars they are today.

With Today's Special, Phaidon tries to achieve the same goals, on an even bigger scale, providing fascinating insights into the dazzling range of culinary creatives working today. Like the chefs themselves, the recipes are not uniform in style. To preserve the voices and personalities of the chefs, the recipes are presented in the form in which they were submitted.

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The Most Exciting Rising-Star Chefs

Today's Special is packed with more than 300 recipes and 500 images celebrating finished dishes, chef portraits, restaurant interiors, and more.

As you probably already realized this is not a traditional cookbook. Instead of focusing on the recipes, this book focuses on the chefs behind today's food industry. More than a cookbook, Today's Special is a celebration of a vibrant industry. The broad geographical reach of chefs and cuisines is incredible, including names as Jeremy Chan of Nigeria-inspired Ikoyi London; Toyomitsu Nakayama of Toyo, Tokyo, Japan; Manoella Buffara of Brazil; and Slovenian chef Luka Košir.

Although it is only now being published, Today's Special came together before our world changed. The restaurant industry has been hit hard, and now these pages contain an extraordinary source of hope in the innovative and determined spirit of those sustaining our culinary future. This book is a who's who of who's next in the global dining world - men and women making their distinctive marks across continents, techniques, and styles.

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Final Thoughts

As written in the book, the publication of Today's Special is a celebration of an endless industry that has, most recently, shown courage and solidarity in the face of great challenges. Like Coco, Today's Special is destined to become a classic that pays tribute to the young creators who remain eminently influential in their generation's future.

In our opinion, this is a book that not only will delight food writers and critics but everyone who loves this industry and want to get to know the next generation of culinary superstars.