I missed Chefs of the Triangle when the guidebook came out this past summer. But it is worth checking out for anyone who visits the area and ends up hungry.
The Triangle has earned a pretty good national reputation in recent years, with its best chefs and restaurants getting featured in Food & Wine, Gourmet and The New York Times.
The area's rising population, a mix of native Southerners and transplants, has produced many restaurants that appeal to Southern and cosmopolitan tastes.
Chefs of the Triangle (John Blair, $16.95) is a guidebook for travelers, a cookbook and an inside look at the men and women behind the stoves.
The author is Ann Prospero, a freelance writer in Durham and a former features writer for The Miami Herald. The book resulted from her blog, Prospero's Kitchen (http://prosperoskitchen.typepad.com), in which she posted interviews with chefs, along with sample recipes.
Prospero profiles 34 chefs from 31 restaurants and one cooking school. The restaurants are in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Hillsborough, Cary and Pittsboro.
Newcomers may want to go straight to the Chefs' Chefs chapter in the back. It includes what Prospero calls the "model" chefs who have influenced so many others in the area.
First among these are Ben and Karen Barker, the husband and wife owners of the Magnolia Grill in Durham. Together, they have elevated Southern food into the world of 21st-century fine dining. In the process, they have both earned James Beard Awards and written two cookbooks, Not Afraid of Flavor and Sweet Stuff.
Second is Andrea Reusing of Lantern in Chapel Hill, perhaps the chef who has received the most attention in the national press. Reusing is a New Jersey native who stumbled into both the Triangle and into cooking and wound up wowing people with her inspired take on Asian food.
Readers also learn about Sarig Agasi of Zely & Ritz in Raleigh. An Israeli, Agasi grew up on a kibbutz and started cooking in New York restaurants while his wife, Nancy, attended graduate school. It is worth noting that Agasi and his family came to Raleigh after reading about its food scene in Food & Wine. Now he serves Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food and partners with a local farm for many ingredients.
Also notable is Scott Howell, who worked at the Barkers' Magnolia Grill and now runs Nana's in Durham. He also worked with such nationally known chefs as Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles and David Bouley of Bouley restaurant in New York. But the food he cooks at Nana's is perhaps some of the best in the South. And it is all inspired by his North Carolina grandmother, with such foods as sweet-potato gratin with prunes, and sweet-and-sour Vidalia-onion relish, recipes included here.
Other recipes in the book include the Mexican corn-tamale cakes of Andres Macias at Tonali in Durham, baked winter-squash soup from Bill Smith of Crook's Corner in Chapel Hill, and walnut prawns from Michael Chuong at An, a Vietnamese-French fusion restaurant in Cary.
One particularly interesting aspect of the book is drawing the connections between all the chefs. How the Barkers and Walter Royal of the Angus Barn in Raleigh were influenced by the late Edna Lewis, how Andreas Reusing influenced Ashley Christensen of Poole's Downtown Diner in Raleigh, and how Bill Smith, Amy Tornquist and others drew inspiration from the late Bill Neal.
Neal in particular is a presence that hovers over the Triangle. Neal cooked at La Residence and Crook's Corner, earning praise and respect for his Southern food in the 1980s -- at a time when "Southern" and "fine dining" typically were not used in the same sentence.
Chefs of the Triangle shows just how far the Triangle has come.
mhastings@wsjournal.com
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