Diacono & Sprout
Can you identify with this feeling?
“There is a day, somewhere between the ages of 39 and 47 (or about 2 months after the arrival of your first child, whichever comes first) where your primary ambitions move wholesale and unannounced from a fantasy life peppered with travel, adventure and outstanding sex frequently enjoyed, to the oasis of an easy midweek supper.”
Boom! That may sound like Patricia Highsmith being voiced by Rachel Kushner but – if you know his writing and his books – then you know that that is Mark Diacono, and only Mark Diacono. The humour; the self-deprecation; the modesty; the wit; the terseness; the liveability; the expertise. The world is filled with food writers who would kill to write that sentence, but who will never manage to do so.
Mark Diacono is the laureate of the cookery book, a writer who loves to cook, and grow, and listen to music, and organise his world, and write. He is that rare thing: a wise dude. Experience, both hard-won and picked-up, drips from his language, and it powers through Vegetables (Hardie Grant) his latest meisterwerk.
There are sentences here as gorgeous as April’s asparagus – “radish’s peppery bite and rhubarb’s sharp edge suit each other like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau” – and punchy as watercress – “I’m not that crazy about pizza. Give me pissaladiere every time. It is - along with Zinedine Zidane and Brigitte Bardot - one of Provence’s finest gifts to the world.”
And he does this through a book about vegetables! You know vegetables: the things you don’t pay enough attention to, the things your mother boiled to death every day, whilst emptying the cooking water down the sink.
Mark Diacono treats his veg like the precious gifts they are: to have vegetables growing in a few centimetres of topsoil across the planet “is almost beyond belief. That many are delicious – or can be made so thanks to centuries of experimentation – is astonishing.”
Vegetables is 225 pages filled with Diacono’s astonishment, and his reverence makes for great cooking, whilst the writing makes the pages dance.
Theo Kirwan brings a laser-focussed eye to his debut book, Saladology, a dizzying cavalcade of superlative recipes whose energy, verve, chutzpah and innovation will surprise no one who has ever eaten Sprout & Co food, watched Theo’s cooking videos, or simply observed how Theo and his brother Jack have built an east Coast empire of seven food outlets in the space of no time.
The Sprout secret was evident when they took over a defeated destination at the bottom of Dublin’s Dawson Street and turned the no-hoper into the hottest ticket in town. That success showed how these guys are true disruptors: where others fail, they succeed, and the evidence of the hard-core substance of their work is all in Theo’s book: Saladology recipes are killers, and you both need and want them in your life, especially if you live outside Dublin and can’t access Sprout grub yourself.
Theo’s food works because he is always searching for the dopamine hit in every dish. His food has to have an “emotional impact” and what better way to do that than by cooking dishes that reward your subconscious food memories. The guys can even get something rewarding from their childhood trip to Eddie Rocket’s – a “secret sauce” – which they use in The Diner Salad.
This ability to collate memory, fashion, production, travel, nostalgia and hipness means Sprout are an agglomeration of everything that has come at us in food in the last two decades, synthesised through the lens of a guy who wants every dish to offer a “lightbulb moment”, a flavour or a texture that hooks you like a pop song earworm (yes, they have Spotify playlists on their site, and pretty good they are too).
Saladology shows that Sprout & Co food would work everywhere, and will work everywhere. We expect the Private Equity money is already shaping up to take them onwards into the U.K. and Europe and beyond. For now, this is a visceral book of great food, and every recipe is worth your time.
Vegetables is published by Quadrille
Saladology is published by Mitchell Beazley
Life is more delicious with Mark Diacono’s writing in it!
Fabulous books that I ❤️