Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Influential cookbooks: Jason Weaver of The French Room

Chef Jason Weaver of The French Room at The Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas is the subject of my latest interview at "Dining with Bacchus."

The restaurant is justifiably famous and the chef served me some amazingly delicious food, including his Crab Cake with Tomato Jam, Tuna Tartare on Watermelon, and Braised Pork Belly, so please check out the interview.

We also talked quite a bit about cookbooks but I chose to leave that out of the "Bacchus" piece. Weaver had already told D Magazine about some of his favorites--
I like El Bulli cookbooks from the restaurant in Barcelona. They’re modern, crazy cookbooks. Fish & Shellfish: The Cook’s Indispensable Companion by James Peterson has a fish dictionary in the back that is very informational. Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji is a great one.
--and I asked him about other influential cookbooks. He said reads hundreds of them, and mentioned a few valuable titles, including Paul Bocuse's and Gordon Ramsay's books, as well as the classic volume by Escoffier, which is "important to come back to for fundamentals and to use as a reference."

Read the interview.

--Marshal Zeringue