Boulevard: The Cookbook [Hardcover]

Nancy Oakes (Author), Pamela Mazzola (Author), Lisa Weiss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2005

Every once in a while a restaurant changes a city's dining scene forever. In San Francisco, that restaurant is Boulevard. In 1993 Nancy Oakes first breathed life into a glorious but forgotten beaux arts building —a survivor of the 1906 earthquake —with her gutsy and ebullient cooking. Just a decade later, the Audiffred Building overlooks a bustling Ferry Plaza, and it's impossible to imagine a San Francisco without its Boulevard. Bathed in the glow of the restaurant's hand-blown lights, with stunning views of the waterfront, dining at Boulevard always feels special. Oakes and long-time collaborator and chef de cuisine, Pamela Mazzola, have seduced locals and visitors alike with their artful yet accessible French-influenced regional American cooking. In BOULEVARD, Oakes and Mazzola present 75 recipes, each anchored by a favorite main and accessorized with an exuberant collection of irresistible sides, all eminently cookable at home. Consider, for example, Pan-Roasted Wild King Salmon in Cider Sauce with Potato-Bacon-Watercress Cake and Shaved Apple and Fennel Salad; Buttermilk-Brined Fried Little Chickens with Cream Biscuits; and Veal Chops with Porcini and Asiago Cheese Stuffing with Roasted Fingerling Potatoes, Tomatoes, Pancetta, and Arugula. With every recipe prefaced by the chefs' wise and unapologetically opinionated cooking notes, BOULEVARD answers the long-running demand for a dialogue with the creative team behind the restaurant's enduring popularity.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nancy Oakes and Pamela Mazzola opened the doors of Boulevard in San Francisco in 1993, and fans have been waiting ever since for just this cookbook. A bigger and better payoff for all that patience is hard to imagine. Boulevard glows on a table top like burnished gold, and suggestions of epic meals seep out from beneath its covers. "We cook because we love to feed people and also because we love the process of cooking," the authors explain in their opening statement. "We don't think for a minute we've invented a new cuisine or discovered a new approach to cooking--only a never-ending quest for what's delicious."

The structure of the book is as classic as many of the underlying cooking techniques--Salads, Soups, and Starters give way to chapters on Fish, Poultry and Game, Meat, and Desserts. A central dish surrounded by its sides or segments renders several recipes per page, making this a book of careful perusal. Mediterranean Mussels with Panzanella and Arugula, for example, gives us recipes for panzanella, the Italian bread salad, for the mussels' poaching medium, a fennel confit, saffron sauce, and arugula salad. Among the soups you'll find White Corn, Roasted Ratatouille, Braised Chestnut, Provencal Fish, and Artichoke Soup as well as the dozen side recipes that help elevate each dish. Ingredients are carefully delineated, followed by chefs' notes, kitchen and shopping notes (how to buy the best scallops, for example), then the cooking method for each piece of the flavor puzzle. Some cooking experience is necessary. There are some challenging dishes between these pages. But new cooks should not shy away. Boulevards establishes a level of culinary rigor to which the best cooks can aspire.

If you can find the main ingredient, Glazed Veal Sweetbreads in Potato Crust with chanterelles and a red wine sauce is a standout appetizer. Pan Roasted Halibut Fillets and Cheeks takes full advantage of morel mushrooms and crisp spring vegetables. Don't miss the Buttermilk-brined Fried Little Chickens with cream biscuits, a trip South for Cornish game hens. Beef shortribs are elevated to new heights with "Steamship" Short Ribs Bourguignon. You might want to finish with Bittersweet Chocolate Cake with caramel corn ice cream and caramel sauce. In each and every case the main theme is flavor, the attack is simple, the effect totally satisfying and elegant.

Nancy Oakes and Pamela Mazzola have distilled between the covers of Boulevard their years of combined efforts in the commercial kitchen, translating for the home kitchen. Their friendship, good humor, and fierce determination to achieve the best flavors imaginable tumble out of these pages. --Schuyler Ingle

From the Publisher

Features 75 signature recipes and gorgeous full-color photography from Boulevard — San Francisco ’s premier restaurant.

In 2001, chef Nancy Oakes received the James Beard Foundation ’s award for Best Chef in California.

Boulevard is a five-time Zagat winner for Most Popular Restaurant in San Francisco.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Ten Speed Press (October 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580085539
• ISBN-13: 978-1580085533
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 1 x 12 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #435,959 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for Beginners, December 21, 2005

By 

Jadepearl "geezer geek" (Wandering, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Boulevard: The Cookbook (Hardcover)

I will try to strike a balance to the previous two reviews. This cookbook is beautiful. It is a large outsized book that will cause people with cookbook holders possible issues but if you have Glazer's _Artisanal Baking in America_ the size should not surprise.

I got this book the first day it was released and have spent the time reading and cooking from it.

1) the recipes are excellent. However, some of the ingredients will be hard and expensive to come by such as sand dabs which are easy on the west coast to get but quite the adventure in the midwest;

2) the recipes are not for beginners. You must have basic, competant skills not to mention maybe some specialized tools to make your life easier such as, a food processor or food mill. If you are hoping for super simple ingredients and expect to have a dinner party done in a few hours this may not be the book for you. The recipes are doable with planning and careful reading;

3) Very west coast, in particular, Northern California. Nancy Oakes and her restaurant Boulevard have been part of the cutting edge providing fresh takes on classics and loving attention to local ingredients.

4) The book is beautiful and could grace a coffee table with gorgeous pictures of food, staff and surroundings. However, sometime I felt that the design of the book took greater precedence than ease of reading and use for the cook. An example is how there is a great deal of white space but the typeface (8-10 pt) is more typical of regular sized cookbooks;

5) I have been a long time fan of her husband, Bruce Aidell, the sausage king, and in his books always had contributions from Nancy that truly showcase meat in all its glory including brining. However, when you read this book you see the expertise with meat but not to the level that I would expect from Ms. Oakes as evidenced from the contributions to her husband's books.

6) The meals are showstoppers. What meal was NOT a showstoppper? Yeah, I'm getting plumper but my figure was sacraficed on a mighty tasty and good looking altar

7) Each recipe is presented this way: main recipe with attendant side items that compose that course. Yes, this includes the salads which have the recipes for the garnishes and accompaniements on the same page. So quite frankly, having multiple courses can be quite the production for it is not just "white corn soup" but the single corn stock, garnish and crab cake souffles. Like I said, not for beginners or someone wanting a meal in 30 minutes.

8) recipes can be modified and adapted easily. So I did not have tiny quail for the buttermilk fried recipe but it did translate very well to chicken and the same for brining the guineau hens. Again, chicken came to rescue. So if you are freaking out about making everything just take the parts that you like

In all, an excellent book. Just remember that this book is not for beginners but people who can plan and have some basic skills.

Highly recommended for the collector and for those who love Northern California cuisine. And if you are wondering where I stand on the debate of Chez Panisse vs. Boulevard? Boulevard because no body does meat/fish/poultry as well.

23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 4 and a half, really. Very good foodie book. Good reading., February 8, 2006

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Boulevard: The Cookbook (Hardcover)

`Boulevard, The Cookbook' is the product of co-chefs, Nancy Oakes and Pamela Mazzola plus professional culinary writer, Lisa Weiss. The restaurant, Boulevard is in the San Francisco Bay area and the second of two restaurants headed up by Oakes and Mazzola. The overall impression I get of the ambiance and the recipes is that Boulevard is a brasserie with a `haute cuisine' attitude and an underpinning of a love of bacon. The love of bacon is entirely understandable, as Nancy Oakes is the wife of the American Pork writer in chief, Bruce Aidells, with whom she has co-authored several books on pork cookery and charcuterie.

When I encounter an oversized cookbook volume with an oversized price (listed at $50), I immediately demote the book's overall score to four stars, unless I find within a truly marvelous source of culinary wisdom. As I write this, I am teetering on the boundary of four and five stars, so we will investigate together how to rate this volume.

To start, I give points for the fact that the table of contents lists the name and page number of every single recipe. Of course, since the book has only 48 recipes, this is no great feat, covering no more than three of the oversized pages. To be fair, the 15 main dish recipes and the soups actually contain recipes for major garnishes or veggie side dishes. If you broke out all the secondary recipes, you may have as many as 60 different dishes. There are also 27 recipes in the `Blvd Basics' chapter, but as these are mostly for things such as stocks, sauces, condiments, and stock garnishes, these hardly count. I don't discount them entirely because I am in love with the idea from Deborah Madison that stocks and other utility recipes should be crafted to fit the dishes in which they are used, so it is important for us to know exactly how it is that Boulevard makes their duck confit to say with accuracy that you are making a `Boulevard recipe' which uses duck confit. It may also be worth noting that some of these recipes are actually served at the authors' other restaurant, L'Avenue and some are actually things they really cook at home.

The main chapters are:

Salads, 6 recipes
Soups, 6 recipes
Starters, 13 recipes
Fish, 7 recipes
Meat, 8 recipes
Desserts, 8 recipes

Since four of the six soups, the white corn coup, the ratatouille soup, the chestnut soup, and the Provencal fish soup (Bouillabaisse) are simply fancy versions of very old standards, we can ask ourselves why should we want to make these versions, when we may have three recipes for corn soup, a dozen recipes for ratatouille, at least three recipes for a chestnut soup, and 20 recipes for a Bouillabaisse (and still no source for Racasse!)? Especially since most of the recipes are really very long. While my favorite Mark Bittman corn soup recipe takes about a half page column in `How to Cook Everything', this white corn soup with `little crab cake `souffles' takes two oversized pages, with four different recipes coming together to make one dish. Similarly, my favorite David Boulud chestnut soup with apples takes but one page, this braised chestnut soup with apple cream and crispy duck confit takes another two pages. And, while chestnuts and duck confit are a natural pairing in southwest France, they are less natural denizens of Napa valley or Santa Clara valley.

To be fair, a considerable amount of space in each of these recipes goes to a rhapsodic headnote about the origins of the dish plus `Kitchen and Shopping Notes' which go into where the restaurant buys and preps its chestnuts, seafood, artichokes and mayonnaise. We learn, for example, that artichokes come packaged like shrimp, with a count per unit carton packaging. And, we learn that the restaurant is perfectly happy using Hellmans / Best Foods mayonnaise off the shelf rather than making it themselves.

It should be obvious that this cookbook is a lot more like Thomas Keller (The French Laundry) and Judy Rodgers' (Zuni Café) efforts than the much more straightforward fish restaurant books by Eric Ripert (Le Bernardin) and Thomas Kinkead (Kinkead's) books. Thus, it is to be read more as a source of inspiration and ideas and maybe a dish for some very special entertaining occasion than as a workaday cookbook. Of course, this is also the kind of book that a patron of Boulevard would be very happy to have.

When compared to books by Keller and Rodgers, this book fares well, but it is probably not better than these two exemplars of the `great restaurant' book. But, if you buy this kind of book, this is definitely one you will want. If you buy `great restaurant' books for cooking tips and insights, this book is good, but not great. I encountered a lot of things I already knew and no major new insight. So, the fewer books of this type you have, the more valuable this one will be. If you have a big cookbook library, the margin of value will be small.

Since the book makes excellent use of some distinctly west coast seafood such as Dungeness crab, California white sea bass, and king salmon, the marginal value is also higher for west coasters than us Yankees or even our Johnny Reb cousins on the east coast.

Of course, all the recipes are very well detailed, look great in sumptuous pics, and, I'm sure, taste great. There are even a few, such as the scallop and squid recipes, which may just be simple enough for you to improvise into your own repertoire.

All in all, this is a very good, but not a great foodie book.

37 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Warning - you will feel inferior, January 14, 2006

By 

Chris A. Altwegg (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Boulevard: The Cookbook (Hardcover)

Now that I have your attention, I'd like to seriously warn you about expecting this book to be a cookbook you might use. It is a collection of marvelous presentations, but unless you have a full professional kitchen, a couple of sous-chefs hanging around, and are the kind of person who loves to spend a week preparing the basic ingredients for an upcoming meal, this book should be enjoyed as a wonderful commercial for the restuarant, and not as a cookbook. Every "recipe" is a full blown presentation (see other review listing); a base preparation, under the star presentation supported by a cast of at least two if not three co-stars. And if you try to just make one of the items, I'm afraid you'll end up feeling inferior that you didn't prepare the full meal deal.

Lovely photographs, by the way.

Get the book from the library, save your money to take a trip to SF and eat at the restaurant. That's what I should have done.