The Urban Cookbook [Hardcover]

King Adz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 3, 2008

Street food, street art, and street style: creative recipes for the graffiti generation.

Here is an international culinary first, a cookbook with a difference: recipes to feed the creative appetite, born out of the edgy, rugged culture of the street. Jerk chicken with hot pepper gravy, Ras-el-hanout lamb, Trinchada, Potjiekos, Rajad's perfect steak: King Adz explores five of the world's greatest cities to seek out and cook forty dishes in all.

From Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam to London and New York, his road-trip rules were to use public transport, eat street food, and stay in cheap, locally run hotels, all of which allowed him to visit places that are seldom covered in traditional travel or food titles.

This being a cookbook unlike any other, once your appetite for food has been sated, you can go on to find all that epitomizes urban creativity through interviews with key photographers, illustrators, fashion designers, digital and street artists, skaters, DJs, club owners, musicians, street-savvy talent scouts, and Internet entrepreneurs. 250+ color illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Graphic designer Adz's eye-catching but haphazard compilation-a beautiful mess of photography, collage, art, interviews and recipes-is more likely to cause furrowed brows than feasting. Adz takes readers on a whirlwind tour of five cities known for their style (New York, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and London), interviewing local artists working in a variety of media (toy design, music, film, photography, illustration) to get their thoughts on creativity and the city. Each featured location is augmented with Adz's "Hit List," in which he lists his favorite shops, clubs, restaurants and musical artists to listen to while walking the city. Ironically, it's when Adz shifts to recipes (50 "street food" gems from each city) that the book loses momentum. A dazzling mish-mash of styles and points of view gives way to pedestrian dishes like beef stroganoff, spaghetti and meatballs, omelettes, meat loaf and vegetable pasta. For the most part, these recipes offer little insight into their home city's culture; it's barely worth pointing out that most of these dishes are not prepared, sold or eaten in the streets. Though it fails spectacularly as a cookbook, Adz's volume succeeds as a visual travelogue of street art and cutting edge design.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Adz expands the idea of what a cookbook ought to entail with this loud, brash book. Focusing on five different hip urban meccas—Paris, London, Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam—he presents a hyperactive mix of profiles of underground artists of all stripes; tastemaking lists of shops, restaurants, and iPod playlists; a generous array of collages, photographs, digital artwork, and edgy design work; and, oh yeah, some recipes. The food choices are sensible, relatively simple, and reflect each location, particularly its “street food,” and even have a few unexpectedly clever tips (such as draining pasta in a colander loaded with spinach to quickly blanch the greens). Overall, though, the whole is exactly the sum of its parts, a Technicolor manifesto of cool, with a few quick, regional recipes thrown into the mix, often presented at such a low volume as to get drowned out by the rest of the cultural noise. After all, even though they might be driven almost entirely by a relentless need for self-expression, hipsters gotta eat, too. --Ian Chipman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson (November 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500514305
• ISBN-13: 978-0500514306
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,001,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

King Adz is an author and creative/director who specializes in the creation and documentation of Youth Culture. He has traveled constantly for the last 15 years examining global youth talent and sub-cultures and been lucky enough to work with some of the most influential and interesting people around.

He roams the globe to touch, taste and experience what's happening on the ground, documenting his findings in book projects like The Urban Cookbook (Creative Recipes for the Graffiti Generation) and Street Knowledge (An A to Z of Urban Culture). Whether he's going underground in Tel Aviv or discovering new sounds in Rwanda, Adz uses his little black book and unwavering honesty to expose the biggest players and break-out names in the world of creativity, street culture, food, travel and beyond.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Specific to be Generic. Too Generic to be Specific., June 22, 2009

By 

Daniel Lobo (Washington, DC More often than not.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Urban Cookbook (Hardcover)

The Urban Cookbook is an overview of 5 cities under a concept design to offer a synopsis of urban culture, graffiti, artist, walks, or cooking. The graphic design ties the book together in a solid manner but little else does. 4 cities in Europe (Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, London) with the inevitable US icon (New York) form the snapshot at this global trend, and while this cities have a rightful spot in this narrative is quite limiting, superficial and predictable to keep on beating on a regular basis the same bunch of cities with so much going on around the world both in places large and small.

Some things work better than others, and I would say that either if you are going to visit one of these cities for the first time or have little familiarity with dominant urban culture trends the book is worth a read. Descriptions of walks, and urban routes are probably some of the best fragments, with good ideas to take a stroll around the city. The interviews do not work so well. Aimed at a selected group of artist in each town, the same questions become repetitive, and predictable, in particular those that do not work and offer little insight into each person interviewed or the city they are supposed to represent.

The notion to include cooking as a recognizable and key part of urban cultures is probably the most daring aspect of the book. But while the recipes seem cogent with some sense of quickness, wholesomeness and city creed, ultimately one feels they do not gel to offer interest as an urban cook book.

These might be 5 urban recipes for KingAdz and it is nice to have them shared but the personal experience only shines in places. Moreover, like many other volumes in the genre, it is quite a trite trend to pretend that the book is comprehensive or represents cogently a whole movement or group of people: "creative recipes for the graffiti generation"?
The Uban Cookbook might be good for a bite but you are having candy at best.

3.0 out of 5 stars Its o.k, May 4, 2011

By 

Jose Contreras - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Urban Cookbook (Hardcover)

Great coffee table book but other than that not much to it. I thought there would be more cooking recipes maybe more pics

4.0 out of 5 stars Full of flavor, this book is dope, March 19, 2010

By 

Nathan T. Smith (Anaslime, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Urban Cookbook (Hardcover)

I love flipping through this book when I'm bored. I've only dared to try one of the recipes (I'm a horrible cook) but the food amounts to less than half of this books contents. The bleeding edge photos and graphics mean you'll always find something new when you pick it up. The narrative is trendy, almost hipster, but it's got more than enough flavor to keep it out of the corn. Lots of fresh finds that open your eyes to some new artistic styles are to be found here. If you're in to hip hop and graphic design (as I am), you'll absolutely love this book. There is something to be said about the unique fusion of urban art, food, and music which the author does tastefully well.