Back in Chicago, they had to focus on recipe testing and photographing the food. As most chefs know, even in the (unlikely) case that you have recipes written down, they probably aren’t ready for prime time. Even when they are cleaned up, they aren’t ready. Restaurant recipes are in proportions too large for the home cook, they don’t include much if any information on the method and assume you know how to cook at a pretty high level. Even if they have a lot of detail, they don’t have the kind of detail a home cook requires.
The apprehension they felt was justified. There is a lot more to putting a book together than just selling a publisher on the idea. They had to figure out how long the book would be, the schedule for when they would turn in various drafts of the book, what the resulting book would cost ($35 is the norm for hardcover restaurant cookbooks, Timberlake says) and a million other details, not the least of which was the book’s design.
The cover of The Adventures of Fat Rice is not a food porn-y image of a dish that has been styled within an inch of its life. It’s a drawing of a giant fire-breathing chilli clam emerging from the sea to attack the city of Macau, on whose beachfront sits a small rooster (aka the galo)—looking as alarmed as anyone would at the prospect of death-by-chilli-clam. It’s a comic book cover that vibes a lot more skater than serious chef-historian, and that’s not by accident: Conlon and Lo don’t take themselves too seriously.
