tastingmenu.com - All About Apples Press Release, August 23, 2004

Monday, August 23, 2004, Seattle, WA -- Chef Scott Carsberg of Lampreia Restaurant and Hillel Cooperman of tastingmenu will be publishing a new cookbook on Monday, September 13, 2004. Both have been nominated for a James Beard award, twice for Carsberg in the northwest chef category and once for Cooperman in the Internet writing category. The cookbook, called All About Apples, is the first to come from the restaurant and the website. The book is 100 pages, and contains an almost unprecedented 291 photographs, all focused on Carsberg’s eight-course Washington state apple-themed tasting menu.

In a sea of restaurants that adhere to fads, fickle restaurant critics, and the advice of consultants, Lampreia has slowly and steadily built a loyal, almost religious following who value its unique, minimalist style. Carsberg operates outside the growing legion of homogenized “celebrity chefs” while maintaining standards as high as the most famous and accomplished of culinary artists. Carsberg’s food is fresh, seasonal, refined, luxurious, and yet deceptively simple. Meals at Lampreia are special but not formal. Dishes are exciting and challenging, but approachable. Carsberg’s cooking is grounded in the northern Italian style gleaned during his many years cooking in Europe. He combines this with the fresh ingredients of home – the Pacific Northwest.

“Growing up in the northwest, and cooking here every day, it’s impossible not to feature the bounty of Washington state’s apple harvest on my menu,” said Carsberg. The eight dishes in All About Apples are a tour of many of the apple varieties grown in Washington state and of other local and seasonal ingredients like Dungeness crab and chestnuts. “What I love about this cookbook is the freedom to really show what goes into making each dish. While Lampreia doesn’t have the luxury of an army of cooks, our dishes are still more involved than the average food made at home. The details in All About Apples capture the truth of how Lampreia’s food is really made. And the only way we could have done a project this ambitious and special is with the passionate people at tastingmenu,” said Carsberg.

The web journal tastingmenu.com documents the eating experiences of a group of food lovers in unprecedented detail. The food is lovingly described and documented with beautiful photography. The site makes the hundreds of thousands of readers who’ve visited it over the past couple of years salivate, laugh, and rush to eat at the restaurants described. Most importantly, readers value tastingmenu.com for its authenticity and commitment to the flavors it describes. The stories aren’t polluted by trends in ingredients, culinary fads, or restaurants that are “happening.” They just report on wonderful eating experiences with humor and honesty. The food isn’t fawned over by food stylists applying chemicals under expensive professional lighting to make the food look perfect. The descriptions and photographs are of the actual food served, and of the actual ingredients used. You see exactly what they ate – from street food to haute cuisine.

All About Apples will be released in an electronic format readable on any home computer. It will be distributed over the Internet at a cost of $14.95 per copy. “State-of-the-art cookbooks require a huge capital investment, as well as established physical channels of distribution. The Internet has allowed two modest enterprises like Lampreia and tastingmenu.publishing to create a strikingly beautiful cookbook and get it to customers at a price that’s accessible by just about anyone. The electronic format has also allowed us to focus on just one tasting menu and document it in obsessive detail, something that’s not typically viable in traditional formats,” said Cooperman.

For the first two weeks of the release, tastingmenu.com will feature one dish per day on the website, getting tastingmenu.com readers acquainted with the quality of the book and other menu items featured in All About Apples. “No electronic cookbook published to date has come even close to approaching the quality of this first publication from tastingmenu.publishing. The photography rivals that of any print cookbook out there today. And the beautifully detailed presentation is unmatched by any cookbook on the market,” Cooperman added.

“We hope that the focus on innovative food, obsessive detail, and stunning photographs and design, will strike a chord with the growing food-savvy public, and plan on doing future versions based on additional tasting menus,” said Cooperman.

The book will be available at www.tastingmenu.com/AllAboutApples on Monday, September 13, 2004. Preview CDs will be available early upon request for press review under embargo.

Lampreia was opened on April 15, 1992, by Scott Carsberg. He opened Lampreia with the aim and desire to devote himself to recipes in which each ingredient is clearly identifiable and to pay homage to the knowledge he acquired during his tenure in Europe. At Lampreia he has been able to realize in full the goals of his philosophy as a chef in true European tradition. He is free to apply in the smallest details his continuous search for perfection, whether in the selection of the most appropriate seasonal ingredients such as herbs, a local fish or cheese, the perfect wine to accompany each serving, or in the attentive, refined, courteous, but never pretentious service. www.lampreiarestaurant.com.

tastingmenu was founded in 2001 as a web journal focused on chronicling the global eating adventures of a group of friends. When these friends found themselves going out to restaurants and forgetting which ones they really enjoyed, they needed a place to write down the details of each experience. Posting these write-ups on the web was a natural thing to do – as was photographing the food. Since then, hundreds of thousands of readers have visited tastingmenu.com. In 2003, the site was nominated for a James Beard Award for an article about searching for, not finding, and finally creating from scratch a decent batch of bagels. While based in Seattle, tastingmenu.com reports on food from all over the world, including New York, London, and Tokyo. www.tastingmenu.com.

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