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.

Slow Food is a global, grassroots organization with more than 200,000 supporters in the USA. It was founded in 1989 to prevent the disappearance of local food traditions, counteract the rise of fast life, and combat people's dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, and how food choices affect the world around us. Founded in Italy, it is now active in more than 160 countries and involves millions of participants. Slow Food runs two international conferences annually and organizes hundreds of other events, both through its headquarters and via its more than 1,500 local chapters.

"Slow Food has become a force to be reckoned with, probably the only international organization that integrates concerns about the environment, tradition, labor, health, animal welfare ... along with real cooking, taste, and pleasure." Mark Bittman, The New York Times