The Best Cookbooks of Spring 2025, According to Eater Editors | Eater

"Situated on a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in Half Moon Bay, the chef describes his setup bluntly: "I cook in a rented caboose on the side of the highway," Scott Clark writes. Clark—a former chef de cuisine at San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Saison—turns modest surroundings into exuberant, carefully executed food: Dungeness crab rice, chicken-fried morels with red-eye gravy, kale salad with candied kumquats and toasted buckwheat groats, and a standout hen-of-the-woods sandwich (mushrooms pan-fried with a slice of cheddar and an egg, then plopped on toasted bread with a slathering of the chef’s signature mayonnaise riff called Dad Sauce). The book of recipes framed as a road trip down the PCH conveys the restaurant’s hearty, gorgeous, slightly wild California sensibility; not every experiment lands (a white-chocolate melting method yielded pebbly white chocolate in one snack), but the recipes frequently deliver the kind of simple, rewarding results the reviewer associates with a “damned fine meal I made myself.”" - Rebecca Flint Marx