Dad, What's for Dinner? : Lifesaving Recipes to Avoid Meltdowns, Have Fun in the Kitchen, and Keep Your Kids Well Fed: a Cookbook

A BON APPETIT BEST COOKBOOK OF 2025

The dad’s guide to getting dinner on the table; more than 80 unfussy, uncompromising recipes for weeknights and beyond. With a foreword by Gwyneth Paltrow.

I am a professional chef. I’ve spent twenty-seven of my forty years in some of the best kitchens in the world. . . . And still, when my daughter, Helena, asks, “Dad, what’s for dinner?” it gets me every time.

This is a book for dads (and moms, and grandparents, and caregivers, and anyone else who needs to get dinner on the table without cooking the same old thing again). It’s a book that believes “kids’ food” can, and should, mean more than just buttered noodles or chicken fingers. In its pages, chef David Nayfeld translate his decades of professional expertise into something that all parents can use to become more confident and creative in the kitchen, and better able to care for their toughest customers—their kids.

The result is a collection of more than eighty hearty, good-for-you recipes the whole family will love, from Italian Sausage and Broccolini Lasagna to The Best Fricking Meatloaf in the World; from Tomato and Bread Salad (it still counts as a salad!) to Cuppycakes with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting.

Nayfeld’s goal is to empower home cooks, giving them the tools, strategies (the wonders of batch-cooking!), and recipes to break a reliance on frozen foods and takeout. It’s a book that helps to bring families together at the dinner table and to raise more adventurous eaters. And, most of all, it’s a book that answers the all-important question: Dad, what’s for dinner? (or lunch, or breakfast, or . . .)

David Nayfeld worked with some of the best chefs in the world before co-creating Back Home Hospitality and opening the group’s first restaurant, Che Fico, in San Francisco, which was named one of the best new restaurants in America by Bon Appetit and Esquire. He is also the chef and co-owner of Che Fico Parco Menlo, Il Mercato di Che Fico, and Che Fico Pizzeria, and was Star Chefs’ 2019 Rising Star Chef. Most recently, Nayfeld was named a semifinalist for the 2023 James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Chef.

Joshua David Stein is a journalist, author, and editor. He has served as the editor at large at Fatherly and Out magazines, the editor in chief of BlackBook and Avenue, and the senior editor at Departures. His work has appeared in The New York Times, New York, Esquire, GQ, Hemispheres, among many other publications. Previously, Stein was the restaurant critic for the Village Voice and the New York Observer. He is the co-author of Notes from a Young Black Chef with Kwame Onwuachi; Il Buco: Stories & Recipes with Donna Lennard; the Nom Wah Cookbook: Recipes and Stories with Wilson Tang; Why I Cook? with Tom Colicchio; and Vino: The Essential Guide with Joe Campanale. His children’s books include, among others, Can I Eat That?, What’s Cooking, Brick: Who Found Herself in Architecture, Solitary Animals, and Lunch from Home. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his two sons, Augustus and Achilles.