What real cookbook authors say about AI copycats. Plus, how Noma LA tested food editor Daniel Hernandez’s fine dining assumptions, a new rotisserie chicken to obsess over, where to find great cemitas poblanas, immaculately fried pub food and the dispute over trademarking the term “bean club.” I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with Tasting Notes.
AI’s sloppy seconds
(Subin Yang / For The Times)
A cookbook is rarely a linear first-to-last-page read. Most of us flip through the pages, taking in the photos, pausing to check out recipes that fit our personal cooking style — or what we’d like our personal cooking style to be. If we’re not pressed for time, we might read at least the start of the author’s introduction before setting the book back on a shelf, ready to be consulted when we need a new recipe for a dinner party or to liven up our weeknight repertoire. Or maybe just when we want to feed our wanderlust and immerse ourselves in the cooking lives of food lovers in faraway places.
Yet as Eater L.A. editor and writer Mona Holmes told an audience during a LitFest in the Dena panel discussion she and I joined on Thursday with novelist and L.A. Times Food contributor Michelle Huneven, more people like her are turning to AI instead of cookbooks for their menu planning.
“I swear to God, when I don’t want to go shopping after work I [input] a bunch of ingredients already in my cupboard and fridge and say, ‘Make me a menu,’” she said to the crowd of book lovers about her AI habit. “I love my cookbook collection, but I’m not sure that after reading for my job all day I want to crack open a book and read some more to come up with a recipe.”
“Maybe cookbooks are better for reading,” suggested Pasadena Star News columnist Larry Wilson, who moderated the panel.
“I do that,” Holmes said. “I’ll read them, but I usually don’t cook from them.”
Even without AI, cookbooks have long been in competition with online recipe websites and social media influencers. And yet, as I wrote awhile back in this newsletter, in a world gone digital many of us are still buying cookbooks.
After an 8% year-over-year uptick between 2010 and 2020, cookbook sales have kept steady. A recent summary of cookbook sales data showed that “U.S. sales jumped to 17.2 million units in 2023, per BookScan data” and “global cookbook market revenue reached $4.2 billion in 2023.” Baking cookbooks are even more robust with 2025 sales, as NPR and others reported, “up about 80% over the past year, according to research group Circana.”
These numbers are one reason we’ve started to see not just AI help with recipes but AI cookbooks, many of which try to mimic the work of real authors.
Joanne Lee Molinaro, whose “The Korean Vegan Cookbook” won the 2022 James Beard Award for vegetable-focused cooking, wrote about the strange experience of seeing “dozens” of “knockoff” Korean vegan cookbooks — including one that “looked like a term paper put together by a half-baked college freshman with an inkjet printer” and another that closely resembled the look of her own book by an “author” with “zero digital footprint and basically didn’t exist.” Plus, some of the recipes weren’t actually vegan.
“The first recipe I scrolled to,” she wrote of one of the AI books, “was ‘Banana Bread,’ which called for eggs and milk. The second was ‘Korean Ground Beef,’ which called for, uh…yeah…ground beef.”
Molinaro was able to get the most egregious imitator delisted from Amazon and I haven’t yet spotted any AI versions of her newest book, “The Korean Vegan Homemade.” But she is hardly alone.
In December, Adam Erace, co-author with chef and restaurateur Joey Baldino of “Dinner at the Club: 100 Years of Stories and Recipes From South Philly’s Palizzi Social Club,” wrote in Bon Appetit about trying to cook from a shoddy AI rip-off of his book — and trying to fix the errors in his own kitchen after he bought a copy.
“Why didn’t you let the recipe not work?” his wife asked.
“I just couldn’t help myself from proactively troubleshooting these demented recipes,” he wrote. “[A gnocchi] recipe instructed me to bake them in the oven, cool and serve. That’s it. The recipe just ends; no sauce. So I went into salvage mode, sauteeing the spongy, underseasoned … innards in brown butter, rosemary and Parm. [My wife] looked at me like I was a kidnapping victim helping to tighten his own ropes.”
“I … don’t mind if people draw inspiration from me and create their own video, story, book, or some combination thereof based upon something they saw in my work,” wrote Molinaro, who acknowledged that recipes cannot be copyrighted. “But, they do need to put in the work, instead of simply capitalizing off of mine.”
After all, real cookbook authors often take years to research and write their cookbooks — in Molinaro’s case with her first book, it took five.
For Nashville chef Arnold Myint, you could say it took a lifetime to learn his late mother’s cooking and life lessons before writing “Family Thai,” which is so personal the design incorporates textile patterns his mother collected and wore. Ifrah F. Ahmed absorbed the recipes not only of her mother but generations of Somali cooks for the just-released “Soomaaliya: A Cookbook.”
Myint, Ahmed and Molinaro were just three of the real cookbook authors who came to our L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC. Thanks to Ken Concepcion and Michelle Mungcal, owners of the cookbook shop Now Serving, some of the season’s best authors — many represented in our picks for this year’s best spring cookbooks — signed their books and shared cooking advice with festival attendees.
And given that our reading patterns with cookbooks are so nonlinear — and that some publisher estimates say a typical buyer will try out just two recipes or maybe three in any single cookbook sold — I asked the authors at the booth to share the recipe or chapter that readers should turn to first in their cookbooks. Here are their answers:
Joanne Lee Molinaro, ‘The Korean Vegan Homemade’
Joanne Lee Molinaro, author of “The Korean Vegan Homemade,” at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the 2026 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s got to be my spicy celery soup. Celery has a bad rap. And I’m telling you, if you make spicy celery soup you’re going to fall in love with celery.”
Arnold Myint, ‘Family Thai’
Chef and author Arnold Myint shows off the end papers of his cookbook “Family Thai,” which uses one of the many textile patterns that his late mother collected and wore. He signed books at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“If you’ve never cooked Thai food before, [there are] a couple recipes I’d love to help you with. One is crucial. It’s how to cook rice. Right? Everybody needs to know how to cook rice. And once I have your trust, you can lean into cooking noodles from scratch.”
Ifrah F. Ahmed, ‘Soomaaliya: A Cookbook’
Ifrah F. Ahmed, author of “Soomaaliya: A Cookbook,” at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“I think you should make Bariis Isku Karis, which pictured is on the back. It’s a one-pot goat meat and rice dish. Super aromatic.”
Pyet DeSpain, ‘Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking’
Pyet DeSpain, author of “Rooted in Fire,” at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“My favorite chapter is the very last chapter, celebrating the seasons. I go into depth not only about how we can eat with the seasons, but also how to treat ourselves during the seasons. There’s a lot of information, a lot of storytelling and just ways to celebrate each season as they come in.”
Jorge Gaviria, ‘Vitamina T’
Jorge Gaviria, founder of the heirloom corn brand Masienda and author of “Vitamina T,” at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the 2026 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“My favorite recipe from this book is rib-eye cachetada tacos, which is basically a very thinly sliced cut of rib-eye with some queso asadero, which is a grilling cheese, and some salsa on a flour tortilla. Super, super good.”
Roxana Jullapat, ‘Morning Baker’
Friends & Family baker and co-owner Roxana Jullapat, author of “Morning Baker,” at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“The first thing you should do is probably the chocolate morning muffins [which she demonstrated recently for our “Chef That!” video series]. They are quite easy to execute and very rewarding. Another great little morning recipe to follow up with is salted butter brown scones. It’s delicious. And if you’ve never baked bread before, start with the first recipe in the chapter, all the way to sourdough. It’s a school of bread.”
Nikki Hill and Claire Wadsworth, ‘La Copine Cookbook’
Claire Wadsworth, right, and Nikki Hill, chefs and authors of “La Copine,” at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the 2026 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Claire Wadsworth: “You should probably do our fried eggplant. It’s our most requested recipe. And everyone asks, ‘How do you do it? How do you get it so crispy?’ People who hate eggplant love the fried eggplant. I could eat it every day. And the tomato chutney with it? You’re going to want to put it on absolutely everything.”
Nikki Hill: “I think I’m going to pick a panna cotta. It’s easier than you think. Our first-ever panna cotta was the chocolate panna cotta so I’m going to recommend you give it a try.”
Maxine Sharf, ‘Maxi’s Kitchen’
Maxine Sharf, author of “Maxi’s Kitchen,” at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“I would recommend trying my mom’s Benihana chicken fried rice. [Her mom was a Benihana waitress.] It is so easy and delicious.”
Tara Punzone, ‘Vegana Italiana’
Tara Punzone, author of “Vegana Italiana,” at the 2026 L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“Most of the recipes are from my restaurant, Pura Vita, in West Hollywood. In the beginning of the book, there is a section called ‘The Basics.’ I recommend you start with the marinara sauce and the cashew ricotta. You’ll find them repeated throughout the recipes in the book.”
Joshua Farrell, ‘Serving Up Excellence’
Joshua Farrell, author of “Serving Up Excellence,” at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth during the 2026 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“Serving Up Excellence” is not a cookbook but a book about restaurant service and connecting with guests. So we asked for Farrell’s best advice from the book:
“I think reading a guest well. I love open-ended questions because it starts a conversation. … One of my favorite quotes from the book is when I was interviewing a gentleman and I said, ‘Well, what if you train everybody and they leave?’ And he said, ‘What if I don’t train them and they stay?’”
Also …
Artichoke and mole at Noma LA.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
After chef René Redzepi stepped back from the day-to-day running of the Los Angeles residency of his Copenhagen restaurant Noma — due to the fallout of a New York Times story on allegations of abuse reported to have happened between 2009 and 2017 — L.A. Times Food editor Daniel Hernandez wanted to find out who was eating at the pop-up and what was actually on the plate for the $1,500 meal.
“Lots of people are very close-minded about fine dining,” said 24-year-old student Ryan Phang, who drove to L.A. from the Bay Area for the experience. “They think of food as sustenance, and don’t appreciate the art of it.”
A marketer from Brooklyn told Hernandez, “This is like our Super Bowl.”
As for Hernandez, he wrote that “over an afternoon of 16 courses and seven wines, [Noma] tested every assumption and bias I’ve ever had about fine dining at its peak expression.”
(Elena Resko / For The Times)
Chickens on the rotisserie at Loli Farms in Pasadena.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
- In addition, restaurant critic Jenn Harris proclaims that L.A.’s best rotisserie chicken may be at a former gas station in Pasadena. The Peruvian-style pollo a la brasa from Loli Farms has already worked its way into my weeknight dinner repertoire.
- Harris also declares her love for the “immaculately fried” fish and chips, Scotch eggs and bangers served at Robin Hood British Pub. Opened in Sherman Oaks by Lorraine Williams and her late husband Michael in 1982, it’s Harris’ go-to pub for Dodgers games and Premier League football — and where she will be watching next month’s World Cup matches.
- At downtown L.A.’s Damián, chef Enrique Olvera, renowned for his Mexico City restaurant Pujol, has successfully brought what Harris has called “ah-ha” moments to the plate for nearly six years. Now, as Stephanie Breijo reports, Olvera “is planning to open a modern marisqueria in Venice this summer with a menu of ceviches, fish tacos, cocktails and fresh tortillas.”
- Breijo also reports on Long Beach’s new Mooney’s Pizza Tavern, which features old-school nostalgia with its pies, biodynamic wines (curated by consulting sommelier Ian Krupp of Anajak Thai) and 20 beers on tap chosen by owner and LA Beer Hop founder Hal Mooney. Plus, Karla Subero Pittol‘s popular Venezuelan cafe Chainsaw on Melrose Hill is expanding to the space next door where dinner service is planned. And Venice’s Coucou has expanded to Manhattan Beach.
- Finally, Breijo got her hands on the limited-edition cookbook from Koreatown’s Open Market featuring many of the weekly sandwich specials sold at the cafe and wine shop. The book sold out in “less than three hours,” she writes. But she did get author and chef-partner Andrew Marco to share one of the book’s recipes — an Arby’s roast beef sandwich dupe they call a K-Town Cowboy Roast Beef Sandwich.
