Osteria: 1,000 Generous and Simple Recipes from Italy's Best Local Restaurants

The natural follow-up to our successful La Cucina, this book offers up a more authentic take on Italian cooking than almost any cookbook in the category. It will appeal to fans of Lidia Bastianich and Mario Batali who seek a more direct insight into Italian cooking, straight from the source. It has the impressive brick-package weight of Phaidon's national cuisine cookbooks, but with the Slow Food mark has more bona fides than The Silver Spoon.

With 1,000 recipes from all of Italy's regions, this book offers striking breadth and depth. These aren't "chef recipes," but dishes from humble restaurants that serve cuisine specific to their home areas. This is imminently cookable Italian food. With thorough headnotes that offer fascinating cultural detail, these are more than mere instructions for cooking--together they make up a guide to a much-admired and much-desired way of life.