Urban Cookbook

Here is an international culinary first, a cookbook with a difference: recipes to feed the creative appetite, born out of the edgy, rugged culture of the street. Jerk chicken with hot pepper gravy, Ras-el-hanout lamb, Trinchada, Potjiekos, Rajad's perfect steak: King Adz explores five of the world's greatest cities to seek out and cook forty dishes in all.

From Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam to London and New York, his road-trip rules were to use public transport, eat street food, and stay in cheap, locally run hotels, all of which allowed him to visit places that are seldom covered in traditional travel or food titles.

This being a cookbook unlike any other, once your appetite for food has been sated, you can go on to find all that epitomizes urban creativity through interviews with key photographers, illustrators, fasion designers, digital and street artists, skaters, DJs, club owners, musicians, street-savvy talent scouts, and Internet entrepreneurs.

King Adz is a filmmaker and Creative Director of 100proofTRUTH, a PDF magazine. He is the coauthor of Blek le Rat: Getting Through the Walls.

Street food, street art, and street style: creative recipes for the graffiti generation.

Publishers Weekly

Graphic designer Adz's eye-catching but haphazard compilation-a beautiful mess of photography, collage, art, interviews and recipes-is more likely to cause furrowed brows than feasting. Adz takes readers on a whirlwind tour of five cities known for their style (New York, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and London), interviewing local artists working in a variety of media (toy design, music, film, photography, illustration) to get their thoughts on creativity and the city. Each featured location is augmented with Adz's "Hit List," in which he lists his favorite shops, clubs, restaurants and musical artists to listen to while walking the city. Ironically, it's when Adz shifts to recipes (50 "street food" gems from each city) that the book loses momentum. A dazzling mish-mash of styles and points of view gives way to pedestrian dishes like beef stroganoff, spaghetti and meatballs, omelettes, meat loaf and vegetable pasta. For the most part, these recipes offer little insight into their home city's culture; it's barely worth pointing out that most of these dishes are not prepared, sold or eaten in the streets. Though it fails spectacularly as a cookbook, Adz's volume succeeds as a visual travelogue of street art and cutting edge design.
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King Adz is a former filmmaker and advertising executive turned writer and street-culture aficionado. He is the author of The Urban Cookbook and coauthor of Blek Le Rat.