Welcome! If you are looking to pre-order the book, just click the green button to the right. You'll be able to select the book, (or any other incentive) and use your Amazon account to pay. Thank you for helping us reach our goal by Aug 6th!!!

An Underground Restaurant: Local Food, Artisan Economics, Creative Political Culture (book)

Project Description

After cooking 26 dinners in 3 countries over the last 7 years, we are writing the story of our underground restaurant!  It's a ten course feast, and all the ingredients are sourced from local farmers and artisan producers. The preparation is simple, to inspire our guests to cook at home. They can wander into the open kitchen to watch, ask questions, and help out.

Most of the dishes have a story, of provenance, memory, or family.  The evening includes intimate rituals that remind participants that this is no ordinary dinner. Guests are greeted at the door and promptly hand-fed a bite of food by someone they have never met.

Like the events we host, the book works on several levels. It’s a beautiful experience full of luscious photos. It's about eating and even includes a few favorite recipes. It’s a considered expression of values, and a strategy for manifesting and sharing them, including a how-to chapter with precise logistics. It’s part of a movement, celebrating the creativity and bravado of other underground restaurants and projects. And the book explains how the successes of the local food and underground restaurant movements can be applied beyond the food system to transform our economies.

In the book we tell our own story in great detail. Not because we made a lot of money, got written up in The New York Times, or cooked for famous people. (We haven’t, yet.) But because underground restaurants are not really about cooking for 30 people, or charging your friends for dinner, or having strangers in your house. It's about making space for the things you care about and are worried about and finding ways to celebrate, protect, and grow the kind of world you want to live in. We figured out how to do that as we went along, which is how social movements happen.

Celebrate with us...

Maybe you enjoy good food and want to learn more about this phenomenon. Maybe you came to one of our dinners or another underground restaurant? Maybe you have thought about hosting a dinner yourself?  We’ve got incentives for you either way.

If you want to learn and enjoy, we’ve created incentives to remind you about simple and delicious home cooking:

o   The book! full of photos and stories about our experience, the underground restaurant phenomenon and how it can transform the economy.

o   A postcard to remind you how easy it is to make Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread. Delivered right to your door! When is the last time you got a beautiful piece of mail?

o   Get an 8 x 10 photograph of food that is very simple to cook. (choose from the ones below)

If you want to host your own food event, we have created tools to help you with every step. We’ve made it easy to keep track of all the details so you can worry less and have more fun. You have access to the logistical tools we have developed to deliver 26 events to hundreds of people. This is the very first time we’ve offered these tools and and we don’t know when they will be available again after the Kickstarter.

o   A digital copy of the How-To chapter before the book even comes out! This chapter covers what to do the weeks running up to your event and describes our other favorite projects to spark your imagination. 

o   “Chef’s Kit” Get a package of fill-in forms to manage the logistics for your event. These are the tools we have developed to deliver 26 events to hundreds of people. This is the very first time we’ve offered these tools and and we don’t know when they will be available again after the Kickstarter. 

o   1 on 1 coaching as you put together your first event.

o   For real experiential learning, invite us to host a restaurant at your house!

Project status:

The manuscript is nearly complete. We are in the final phase of editing. We've already pored over more than a thousand photos to choose the most fabulous ones for the book. Here’s the table of contents:

1 Not a potluck: is it food? is it performance art? is it democracy?
   (Introduction)
2 inviting 200 people to dinner
   (The Story of The Viand, our underground restaurant)
3 Dining with strangers
   (The Underground Restaurant Movement)
4 From commodity to community
   (Local Food as a successful model of economic change)
5 The feast that creates culture
   (Transforming the Economy)
6 From the all-chefs to shop-cook-eat, with a 10-course dinner in-between
   (The How-To)

We have decided to self-publish because we want the book to be as luscious as the event itself. We want big text, with plenty of white space around it, and we want color photos on nearly every page. We don't want to fight with a publisher on all that, so we're doing it ourselves. This Kickstarter will keep us in ice cream until we finish the research, writing, layout, and marketing. And it will pay the set up costs for publishing.

Responses to the book

"Fantastic, smart, and beautiful...Like you I have seen first hand how food can work to politicize even the most un-predictable, but my stomach turns at the thought of potlucks. Here it all comes together: food, resistance, politics, trade, community, organizing... all the while it is proof that revolution IS beautiful."

"My knee-jerk response was – when can we start doing these? This is an inspiring resource. It also made me want to be more responsive to what’s at the farmer’s market."

How do we expand the energy of the local food movement? How do we learn to cook again, and build community? Welcome to an elegant restaurant where the guests help cook. It’s a food happening… Join us!

Thank you so much for your support.

                                             We are grateful!