If the kitchen is your favorite room, if cooking is your favorite pastime, or if eating well is your most unregrettable vice, let Great Kitchens take you to paradise. From the home kitchen of Chez Panisse's Alice Waters to The Inn at Little Washington's Patrick O'Connell, each chef's kitchen is a unique jewel of culinary understanding and design. The 26 chefs in this book share the secrets that make a kitchen a great place to cook, to relax, and to enjoy the best of food and company.

The 300 color photographs in Great Kitchens map out an intimate tour of the home kitchens of America's top restaurant chefs. Inside you'll see a remarkable range of styles, each expressed in the cabinets, fixtures, appliances, counters, storage, and finishes of these mouth-watering kitchens. Look inside, meet the chefs, hear their stories, and learn the secrets of first-rate kitchen design -- and be sure to check out the favorite home recipes from each of these 26 world-class chefs in the back of the book.

"This is a warm and wonderful opportunity to move behind all the public relations and commercial glitz and explore the places where some truly real people do their very personal, creative cooking. A truly wonderful idea that makes celebrity a celebration."

-- Graham Kerr, International Culinary Consultant

"Great Kitchens offers an inside look into the home kitchens of some of the most successful chefs in America. Whether at work or at home, today's great chefs know that the kitchen is a nurturing place -- one that should be as inspiring and inviting as it is efficiently designed."

-- Ferdinand E. Metz, President, The Culinary Institute of America

"Great Kitchens is a must for anyone setting out to redo a kitchen or even for those who just want to sit back and gawk enviously. With beautiful photography, floor plans, and explanations, it shows you the best possible kitchens and introduces you to the chefs who own them."

-- James Peterson, author of Essentials of Cooking and Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making

Introduction

1 Ken Hom
Imperial City: LONDON

2 Anthony Ambrose
Ambrosia on Huntington: BOSTON

3 Nora Pouillon
Restaurant Nora * Asia Nora: WASHINGTON, D.C.

4 Mark Miller
Coyote Caf: SANTA FE AND LAS VEGAS
Red Sage: WASHINGTON, D.C.

5 Patrick O'Connell
The Inn at Little Washington: WASHINGTON, VIRGINIA

6 Hubert Keller
Fleur de Lys: SAN FRANCISCO

7 Mary Sue Milliken
Border Grill: SANTA MONICA
Ciudad: LOS ANGELES

8 Charles Dale
Renaissance: ASPEN

9 Rick Bayless
Frontera Grill * Topolobampo: CHICAGO

10 Alice Waters
Chez Panisse * Caf Fanny: BERKELEY

11 Georges Perrier
Le Bec-Fin * Brasserie Perrier: PHILADELPHIA

12 Jean-Pierre Moull
Chez Panisse: BERKELEY

13 Anne Quatrano and Clifford Harrison
Bacchanalia * Floataway Caf: ATLANTA

14 Michael McCarty
Michael's: SANTA MONICA AND NEW YORK

15 Frank McClelland
L'Espalier: BOSTON

16 Tom Douglas
Dahlia Lounge * Etta's Seafood: SEATTLE

17 Terrance Brennan
Picholine: NEW YORK

18 Nancy Oakes and Bruce Aidells
Boulevard * Aidells' Sausage Co.: SAN FRANCISCO

19 Cecilia Chiang
Betelnut: SAN FRANCISCO

20 Robert Del Grande
Caf Annie * Caf Express: HOUSTON

21 Paul Bertolli
Oliveto: OAKLAND

22 Lidia Matticchio Bastianich
Felidia: NEW YORK
Lidia's: KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

23 Joachim Splichal
Patina: LOS ANGELES
Pinot Restaurants: CALIFORNIA

24 Lydia Shire
Biba * Pignoli: BOSTON

25 Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton
Campanile * LaBrea Bakery: LOS ANGELES

26 John Folse
Lafitte's Landing: DONALDSONVILLE, LOUISIANA

27 Favorite Home Recipes

Sources

Have you ever wondered what the home kitchens of great chefs look like or how they are organized and laid out? Have you ever thought about which kitchen equipment the chefs consider essential, and what these culinary trendsetters like to cook when they're not at work?

Great Kitchens is the result of an inspiring year spent visiting with some of the nation's greatest chefs in their own homes to answer these and other questions. Each chef in the book has an expert, yet individual, approach to fine cooking. We suspected that each would offer different insights into how to design the perfect kitchen, and that's what we discovered.

The home kitchens of the 26 chefs in this book run the gamut from a high-tech city townhouse kitchen to a colorful room filled with whimsical art pieces and a lipstick-red stove to a mellow space with a cook-in fireplace in an ancient limestone farmhouse. These kitchens are alike only in the richness of knowledge, experience, good sense, and enthusiasm put into their creation.

Some of these kitchens are the result of new home construction; many are full-blown remodels; others show how to update and improve a kitchen with only minor construction or a few pieces of new equipment. All have features that can be incorporated into your own kitchen. We have also included a detailed Sources section to help you identify products that catch your eye.

A few trends emerged from the design diversity and wealth of ideas presented in the chefs' kitchens. Most of them favor a combined kitchen and dining area that works for family life as well as for entertaining. They opt for higher-than-traditional counters, larger and deeper than usual sinks, generous counter space, a kitchen layout that enhances economy of movement and as much built-in flexibility as possible -- components, in other words, that make the kitchen comfortable and easy to use. They use quality cutlery and cookware and have top-of-the-line appliances, investing in equipment that will endure and perform to their high standards.

But just as there were points of agreement, there were choices in which individual personality and lifestyle prevailed. Interestingly, our chefs were about equally split on the issue of cabinets vs. open storage. Members of each camp put forth convincing arguments for the systems they favor. You'll have the opportunity to consider all sides of this important kitchen organization issue and arrive at your own unique solutions.

All 26 kitchens in this book are dazzling spaces designed to meet the needs of people who love to cook. Yet they also are highly personalized, individualistic spaces. These are not restaurant kitchens, designed and staffed to prepare hundreds of meals each week for the general public; they are kitchens meant for homes, family, and friends. These are kitchens where great chefs take off their white coats and relax; where they scramble eggs for breakfast or roast a chicken for the most fortunate of dinner guests.

They are also kitchens where the kids roll out sugar cookies, where friends sip a glass of wine with their cheese, where people cook holiday dinners together, and where families gather at the end of the day.

To give you a true taste of their personal cooking styles, the chefs contributed favorite at-home recipes to Great Kitchens. You'll find this sampling of great recipes in the back of the book.

In Great Kitchens we share with you what we learned about the best kitchens. We hope you will see parallels to your own lives and homes, and that you will gather up many valuable design ideas to use sometime soon in your own kitchen.