Scrolling through my social media feed, it’s impossible not to notice the sheer volume of people who have made food the centre of their creative lives.
This year feels like the year of the food creator. We’re living in a timeline where chefs, recipe developers, food writers and gastronomic obsessives are inhabiting screens, bookshelves, and kitchens with remarkable simultaneity.
What might have once felt like a casual passion has become a form of culinary rigour: observing, testing, tasting, and reflecting on the act of eating with an exacting, ravenous attention (and breathy TikTok-ready ASMR, of course).
It’s in this environment that the humble food memoir takes on a new significance. These are not the familiar accounts of mishaps or triumphs in old-school Michelin kitchens, but books in which memory, taste and identity are inseparable. A dish is never simply a dish - it carries family histories, moments of ambition, and traces of desire. The writing registers flavour, texture, and aroma with precision, but it also uses them as a lens to consider identity, creativity, and the habits that shape our lives.
Classics continue to have their place, but contemporary food memoirs are exploring sharper territory. The selections gathered below are drawn from 2025 and early 2026 releases, books that capture this new and exciting culinary zeitgeist without making it the novel’s entire raison d’être. They are generous in their knowledge without lapsing into instruction, and reflective without drifting into indulgence. They invite a slower kind of reading, one that notices how ingredients, technique and personal history shape each other.
Social media has made food creators more visible than ever, but these books endure for different reasons. They move at a pace that allows ideas to settle, and that gives space for nuance and reflection. They capture the same curiosity and precision that draws audiences online, but they invite deeper attention, encouraging the reader to consider not just how something tastes, but what it carries.
Shop a curated edit of the food memoirs that everyone's talking about right now, below.
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How to Share an Egg by Bonny Reichert
Reichert’s How to Share an Egg feels like a modern day MFK Fisher memoir (which is the highest of compliments). Reichert examines the intimacy of shared meals alongside the realities of food scarcity.
Her narrative shifts effortlessly between personal anecdotes and broader reflections on community and ethics, while recipes appear alongside stories of family, friends, and kitchens to illustrate how even small acts of sharing can carry meaning. The book is thoughtful and observant, considering not just flavor or technique but what food can reveal about connection, memory, and the responsibilities we carry when we nourish others.
Buy now £13.99, Amazon
Accidentally on Purpose by Kristen Kish
Kristen Kish’s debut memoir charts the path from Midwestern adoptee to Michelin‑trained chef, Top Chef champion and, most recently, Emmy‑nominated host of the show she once watched as a young child. In Accidentally on Purpose, she interlaces kitchen anecdotes, the rigours of culinary school and restaurant life with deeper reckonings about identity, belonging and love.
Kish writes candidly about coming out, the pressures and pleasures of professional kitchens, and how comfort can take shape in both food and relationships. The result isn’t just the story of a chef’s rise but a reflective account of how an unpredictable life can resolve into purpose on its own terms.
Buy now £17.10, Amazon
Tart by Slutty Cheff
Slutty Cheff rose to fame on Instagram, where she shared her anonymous, erotic, wanton, and licentious tales of life in London’s restaurant scene.
Still unknown, Ms Cheff’s new memoir offers a hedonistic glimpse into her life in the capital’s gastronomical underbelly and is filled to the brim with fleshy, delectable sexual tales and unexpectedly sage romantic insights.
Buy now £16.99, Anthropologie
Dirty Kitchen by Jill Damatac
Jill Damatac’s debut memoir turns the concept of a kitchen inside out. Born in the Philippines and raised in the US as an undocumented immigrant, she spent decades navigating the precarity of invisibility before studying at Cambridge and reclaiming citizenship. Damatac uses food — from sisig to adobo — as a way to investigate colonial history, migration and the fractures of identity.
Each recipe becomes a touchstone for the struggles and resilience of her family, not just a reminder of home but a means of interrogating the deep structures that shaped their journey. This is food writing that doesn’t shy from complexity, blending memoir and cultural critique with visceral, sensory detail.
Buy now £10.99, Amazon
Slow Noodles by Chantha Nguon
In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon offers a moving testimony of survival where cuisine and catastrophe are inseparable. A Cambodian refugee, she carries the flavours of her mother’s kitchen through war, loss and exile, sustaining herself in Thai refugee camps and beyond with work that ranged from cooking in a brothel to weaving silk.
The memoir pairs more than twenty Khmer recipes with the landscapes and traumas that defined her early life, making each dish a conduit for cultural memory and resilience. For readers drawn to food as both nourishment and historical witness, this is a powerful example of how the act of cooking can be an act of remembrance and reclamation.
Buy now £13.39, Amazon
Good Things by Samin Nosrat
After reshaping how a generation thinks about technique in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Samin Nosrat’s Good Things distils her accumulated wisdom into a compendium of more than 125 recipes and tips that feel both generous and practical. Here you’ll find ricotta custard pancakes, sky‑high focaccia and braised chicken with apricots and harissa alongside guidance on fundamentals like choosing olive oil and balancing flavours.
Nosrat’s voice — warm, precise and encouraging — invites cooks into a way of approaching food that values simplicity, intuition and shared experience. This is not just a cookbook but a celebration of why certain dishes feel “good” in body and mind.
Buy now £15.00, Amazon
Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever
Care and Feeding blends food writing, memoir and life lessons, exploring how nourishment extends beyond the plate into how we care for ourselves and others. Woolever, known for her work with Nosrat on Salt Fat Acid Heat and wide‑ranging essays on eating and wellbeing, presents essays and reflections that sit somewhere between culinary memoir and practical philosophy.
Whether unpacking the rituals of home cooking or examining the emotional labour tied up in feeding loved ones, her prose turns ordinary meals into moments worth pausing over. This book is as much about the intangible comfort of food as it is about the recipes and rituals that bring us together.
Buy now £13.96, Amazon
I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally
Keith McNally, the man behind NYC institutions like Balthazar, Pastis and Minetta Tavern, adopts a famously candid tone in this memoir that peers into the kitchen of his own life. Beginning with a devastating stroke that reshaped his body and voice, McNally traverses his working‑class London childhood, a teenage actor’s wanderings and decades of founding restaurants that helped define New York dining.
Part professional reflection, part unflinching personal reckoning, the book is rich with anecdotes about love, ambition, rivalry and reinvention — and pitched with exactly the irreverence and hard‑earned insight you’d expect from one of the city’s most distinctive voices in hospitality.
Buy now £13.32, Amazon
