Recipes and lore from El Charro Café, a Tucson landmark famous for its vibrant, fresh Mexican food.

Presents 150 recipes for Mexican food from the 80-year-old Tucson restaurant El Charro Café.

Recipes and photos from the beloved restaurant: “Perhaps America’s foremost experts on regional food.” —San Diego Magazine Southern California Cooking from The Cottage captures the romance, the relaxation, and the good life of one of Southern California’s most beloved restaurants. Included are the recipes that have made The Cottage a favorite for decades with breakfast items such as muffins, coffee cakes, Greek, Italian, and seafood omelets, Belgian waffles, and oatmeal pancakes. From the lunch and dinner menu there are light Southern California seafood and pasta dishes, signature soups, and salads, as well as traditional American classics. With color photos included, you can recreate this delicious dining experience on your own patio on a sunny summer day—or wherever and whenever you feel like it. Southern California Cooking from the Cottage is part of Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood cookbook series, which celebrates the finest regional restaurants in the United States.

The exquisite menu at The Old Post Office Restaurant on Edisto Island, SC, has garnered this one-of-a-kind establishment legions of fans from around the country. It has been written up in the New York Times, Travel and Leisure, USA Today, Wine Spectator and Gourmet. This exciting new cookbook is part of the Roadfood Cookbook Series by Jane and Michael Stern, two of the most popular and successful food writers in America. Like a visit to this historic Southern island (less than an hour from Charleston), Lowcountry Cooking from The Old Post Office Restaurant contains more than 150 favorite recipes for Southern dishes with a classical twist, such as Fussed-Over Pork Chop, P.B.'s Ultimate Filet Mignon, Coca Cola Cake, and Key Lime Mousse. It includes an 8-page color insert. Chef Philip Bardin says, "Breads and desserts are prepared daily and all of the produce and seafood are local and the freshest available in the area. Our stone-ground grits - milled to our specifications - have been a specialty since 1988." Previous Roadfood cookbooks include: Blue Willow Inn Cookbook (1-55853-991-3), El Charo Cookbook (1-55853-992-1), Durgin-Park Cookbook (1-4016-0028-X), Harry Carey's Cookbook (1-4016-0095-6), Louie's Backyard Cookbook (1-4016-0038-7), Carbone's Cookbook (1-4016-0122-7), and The Famous Dutch Kitchen Restaurant Cookbook (1-4016-0138-3).

A RoadfoodTM Cookbook The colorful history of El Charro Café and the 150 recipes for vibrant, exciting Mexican food make this book as unique and entertaining as the 80-year-old restaurant itself. It is rumored that in the 1940s, founder Monica Flin would sit on the El Charro patio, sipping martinis from teacups and playing cards with John Wayne, who was in Tucson to film westerns. Today the restaurant is run by Carlotta Flores and her husband, Ray. The El Charro Café, America's oldest family-operated Mexican restaurant, is located in a house built in the 1890s by Monica's father (who was also Carlotta's great-grandfather). The restaurant's signature dish is Carne Seca Beef, a Tucson passion. The beef is cured high above the restaurant's patio where strips of thin-sliced tenderloin hang in an open metal cage. Old favorites and creative new Mexican dishes that are enjoyable to cook and to serve fill the book. The greatest restaurants in America are its wonderful independent regional restaurants. And there are no greater experts on America's regional restaurants than Michael and Jane Stern. "Coast to coast," said the New York Times, "they know where to find the freshest lobster rolls, the fluffiest pancakes, the crispiest catfish." Rutledge Hill Press is launching a new series of RoadfoodTM Cookbooks, each with recipes, pictures, and the history of one of America's greatest regional restaurants.

Key West is a world apart. People come for one reason or another and never want to leave. Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, and Jimmy Buffett are well known. Lesser known'except to Louie's regulars'are Phil Tenney, Doug Shook, Ben Harris, Darlene Ciulla, and others, all of whom call Louie's "our home and our family." What marks the food at Louie's backyard is innovation. Chef Doug Shook likes to create new variations daily. "Inventing is the joy of cooking," he says, Which means the recipes in The Louie's Backyard Cookbook are the best of many recipes Shook has created over the years. They are for people who enjoy the entire process of creating a meal, from procuring the ingredients to making a handsome presentation of a finished dish. The Louie's Backyard Cookbook contains not only 150 of Doug Shook's most creative recipes, but through photos and stories it takes you behind the scenes to learn about the restaurant and the Key West culture that lures people with its bauty and keeps them with its liberty. The Louie's Backyard Cookbook is the next best thing to experiencing the islands themselves.

From its designation in 1926 to the rise of the interstates nearly sixty years later, Route 66 was, in John Steinbeck’s words, America’s Mother Road, carrying countless travelers the 2,400 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles. Whoever they were—adventurous motorists or Dustbowl migrants, troops on military transports or passengers on buses, vacationing families or a new breed of tourists—these travelers had to eat. The story of where they stopped and what they found, and of how these roadside offerings changed over time, reveals twentieth-century America on the move, transforming the nation’s cuisine, culture, and landscape along the way. Author T. Lindsay Baker, a glutton for authenticity, drove the historic route—or at least the 85 percent that remains intact—in a four-cylinder 1930 Ford station wagon. Sparing us the dust and bumps, he takes us for a spin along Route 66, stopping to sample the fare at diners, supper clubs, and roadside stands and to describe how such venues came and went—even offering kitchen-tested recipes from historic eateries en route. Start-ups that became such American fast-food icons as McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, Steak ’n Shake, and Taco Bell feature alongside mom-and-pop diners with flocks of chickens out back and sit-down restaurants with heirloom menus. Food-and-drink establishments from speakeasies to drive-ins share the right-of-way with other attractions, accommodations, and challenges, from the Whoopee Auto Coaster in Lyons, Illinois, to the piles of “chat” (mining waste) in the Tri-State District of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, to the perils of driving old automobiles over the Jericho Gap in the Texas Panhandle or Sitgreaves Pass in western Arizona. Describing options for the wealthy and the not-so-well-heeled, from hotel dining rooms to ice cream stands, Baker also notes the particular travails African Americans faced at every turn, traveling Route 66 across the decades of segregation, legal and illegal. So grab your hat and your wallet (you’ll probably need cash) and come along for an enlightening trip down America’s memory lane—a westward tour through the nation’s heartland and history, with all the trimmings, via Route 66.