Cookbook as Cliffhanger

Restaurant Nicholas’s handsome tome is for kitchens as well as coffee tables.

At the chef’s table in the kitchen, Restaurant Nicholas’s owners, chef Nicholas and muse-and-manager Melissa Harary, show their son, Nicholas, what good food is.
Photo by Steve Legato.

So firmly ensconced in the top echelon of New Jersey fine dining has Restaurant Nicholas in Red Bank become since opening in 2000 that its success may have seemed inevitable. As the nail-biting first chapter of this big, beautifully designed and illustrated cookbook makes clear, it was anything but.

As chef/co-owner Nicholas Harary describes in his own words (with writer Peter Zuorick), he started as a teenage floor sweeper in a pizzeria, nursed the dream of opening his own fine dining restaurant, and, at 25, with his wife, Melissa, scraped together money to buy a ramshackle Mexican restaurant on Route 35 in Red Bank. It proved to be a money pit (yikes, no support beams in the roof!). Amazingly it all worked out.

The Restaurant Nicholas Cookbook ($45, at the restaurant or on restaurantnicholas.com) carefully interprets Nicholas’s flavorful and elegant cuisine for the ambitious home cook. Thanks to superb photographs by Steve Legato, it’s also a yummy browse.

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