Two-time James Beard award-winning chef Alon Shaya, will visit Austin to share stories of culinary heritage and demonstrate recipes from his new cookbook and memoir SHAYA. He will also take questions from the audience and autograph books. Copies of SHAYA will be available for sale thanks to BookPeople.

ABOUT THE CHEF: Alon Shaya’s celebrated New Orleans restaurants have been hailed as the country’s most innovative and best by Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Saveur, GQ, and Esquire. He opened Domenica, a regional Italian restaurant in New Orleans’ historic Roosevelt Hotel, in 2009. Five years later, in 2014, he opened Pizza Domenica. After several visits to Israel, he was inspired to go back to his culinary roots, and in 2015 opened his namesake Israeli restaurant, Shaya, in New Orleans.

ABOUT THE BOOK: SHAYA is no ordinary cookbook. It’s a memoir of a culinary sensibility that begins in Israel and wends its way from the U.S. to Italy, back to Israel, and comes together in the American South, in the heart of New Orleans. It’s a book that describes how food saved the author’s life and how, through a circuitous path of (cooking) twists and (life-affirming) turns, the author’s celebrated cuisine–food of his native Israel with a creole New Orleans kick–came to be, along with his award-winning New Orleans restaurants. These are stories of place, of people, and the food that connects them, a memoir of one man’s culinary sensibility, with food as the continuum throughout his journey.

ABOUT At CENTRAL: At Central is The Library Foundation’s new cultural series featuring author events, musical performances, film screenings, cooking demonstrations, and gallery exhibitions at the Austin Central Library.