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Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

BURN THE PLACE

Iliana Regan

A Memoir

A singular, powerfully expressive debut memoir that traces one chef's struggle to find her place and what happens once she does.
Burn the Place is a galvanizing culinary memoir that chronicles Iliana Regan's journey from foraging on the family farm to opening her Michelin-starred restaurant, Elizabeth. Her story is alive with startling imagery, raw like that first bite of wild onion, and told with uncommon emotional power. It's a sure bet to be one of the most important new memoirs of 2019.

Regan grew up the youngest of four headstrong girls on a small farm in Northwest Indiana. Even when she was picking raspberries as a toddler still in diapers, Regan understood to pick only the ripe fruit and leave the rest for another day. In the family's leaf-strewn fields, the orange flutes of chanterelles seemed to beckon her while they eluded others.

Regan has always had an intense, almost otherworldly connection with food and earth. Connecting with people, however, has always been harder. As she learned to cook in the farmhouse, got her first job in a professional kitchen at age fifteen, taught herself cutting-edge cuisine while running her “new forager” underground supper club, and worked her way from front-of-house staff to running her own kitchen, Regan often felt that she “wasn't made for this world.” She was a little girl who longed to be a boy, gay in an intolerant community, an alcoholic before she turned twenty, a woman in an industry dominated by men.

Iliana Regan is a self-taught chef. She is the founder and owner of the Michelin-starred “new gatherer” restaurant Elizabeth and the Japanese-inspired pub Kitsune, both located in Chicago. Her cuisine highlights her midwestern roots and the pure flavor of the often foraged ingredients of her upbringing. A James Beard Award and Jean Banchet Award nominee, Regan was named one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs 2016.
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Published 2019-07-01 by Agate Publishing, Inc.

Comments

"In Burn the Place, Iliana Regan shares her nontraditional story of culinary success, from her family farm in Northwest Indiana to an acclaimed Chicago kitchen she can call her own. “People always ask where I went to culinary school; it was in that farmhouse I learned everything I needed to know,” she writes. The Michelin-starred chef is self-trained, and she pinpoints the moment she fell in love with food to the fateful summer day her mother taught her to make pasta and marinara from scratch. Regan's journey has not been an easy one—she describes her struggles with gender identity, queerness and addiction, as she's navigated a male-dominated industry." (Ten Best Books about Food 2019) Read more...

BURN THE PLACE "belongs on a shelf with the great memoirs of addiction, of gender ambivalence and queer coming-of-age, of the grand disillusionment that comes from revisiting, as a clear-eyed adult, the deceptive perfection of childhood." Read more...

Iliana Regan's memoir “Burn the Place” is the first food book to be long-listed for the National Book Award since “Julia Child and More Company,” in 1980.

Annapurna developing TV adaptation Of Iliana Regan's Wild Food Memoir ‘Burn The Place'. Sue Nagel and writing partner Sarah Gubbins want to create a show to be streamed (HBO, Netflix or the like) based on Iliana's life both past and present future at the Milkweed Inn. Read more...

"If the chef René Redzepi (also a Regan fan) is the Nordic godfather of a culinary movement that cultivates a deep connection to the surrounding landscape, Ms. Regan is its Greta Thunberg..." Read more...

[A] biting debut memoir. . . . Foodies will appreciate this blistering yet tender story of a woman transforming Midwestern cooking, in a fresh voice all her own. Read more...