Also of interest ... adventures in gastronomy

Noma

by Réné Redzepi

(Phaidon, $50)

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Though it’s been only six months since Copenhagen’s Noma was named in an annual poll as the best restaurant in the world, this “coffee-table paean” clearly has been in the works for years, said Rebekah Denn in The Christian Science Monitor. Don’t expect to cook from it: Most readers will be hard-pressed to find various ingredients—“bulrushes, sea buckthorn”—that chef Réné Redzepi uses in his Nordic fare. But the essays, recipes, and photographs gathered here provide a lovely window into a marvelous restaurant.

Boozehound

by Jason Wilson

(Ten Speed, $23)

Jason Wilson has combined his “sea legs” as a travel writer with his passion for booze to create a smart globe-hopping tour behind the scenes of the current “cocktail revolution,” said Jon Bonné in the San Francisco Chronicle. Hunting down “some of the world’s more talented distillers,” he celebrates those who are serious about their craft. But he’s also more than willing to let the blowhards “hoist themselves on the petard of their own silliness.”

Dethroning the King

by Julie MacIntosh

(Wiley, $28)

Some fans of Budweiser beer will want to read this account of the 2008 takeover of Anheuser-Busch as “a murder mystery,” said Todd C. Frankel in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They won’t be disappointed. The Financial Times’ Julie MacIntosh scored several scoops when the Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev made its hostile bid to swallow “the King of Beers,” and she’s dug deep to identify former CEO August Busch III as the inside player who pushed hardest for fellow shareholders to take InBev’s money and run.

Palmento

by Robert V. Camuto

(Univ. of Nebraska, $25)

Robert Camuto has made a career of “deftly and entertainingly” demonstrating the central role wine plays in culture, said Eric Asimov in The New York Times. He did it two years ago in his book about French country wines. And he does it again in Palmento, “bringing to life the characters, conflicts, and family dynamics that define” the culture and wines of craggy, tradition-bound Sicily. “It’s a beautiful, enthralling work.”