I have to admit that this is of the oddest cookbooks I have reviewed yet. The recipe chapters are
broken down into The Basics, Vegetables, Fish, Chicken and Egg, Duck, Lamb, Pork, Dessert, and Cocktails. The book consists of recipes with many unusual ingredients that are not readily available outside of areas with specialty stores.

If you regularly visit Camino, then you may be interested in the people described and recipes included in this book. Chapter 3, A Week at Camino, is diary of the daily chores and duties involved with the running of Camino. For example, Wednesday 4:18 p.m., Becca the hostess, works a feather duster around the room. Thursday, 5:32 p.m. Allison readjusts the lights. It isn’t very interesting unless you are familiar with the people and restaurant.

I was excited to find one recipe “Fried Hen-of-the-Woods Mushrooms, Scallions, and Herbs with Yogurt and green Garlic, although it contains ingredients I have yet to find. I was a little less excited to find the Pig’s Head and Trotter Fritters. I did learn quite a bit searching for the definition of ingredients like Trotters, Jaggery, Korean Perilla and Shiso. Just in case I decide to build an outdoor kitchen, there is a lesson on cooking over a wood fire.

I suspect that restaurant insiders will love this book, but I didn’t find it interesting or useful.

I received a copy of this book from Blogging For Books in exchange for an honest review. ( )

As an Amazon reviewer you learn very quickly not to criticize 1) a writer with a fanboy following or large extended family, or 2) a cookbook from a famous restaurant or chef. I got a nose bleed in April 2015 when my Reviewer Ranking plunged 500,000 places after I ignored these rules. And just this week I have been watching my score drop hourly after I dissed a book on tile written by some famous California designers.

Nonetheless, we are supposed to be writing honest reviews and I am being honest when I say that the book "This is Camino" should only be purchased to celebrate a meal at the restaurant. As a memento it might be fun, but it's not worth buying if you want instruction on how to be a better home cook or more discriminating taster.

Camino is a famous specialty restaurant in Oakland and if this book is any indication, Camino is quite a peculiar place. The publisher's blurb mentioned cooking over a fire and I thought we would be learning to work with some variation on an Argentine grill. No, the author cooks over a fire fire and tells us how to cook a gourmet meal over an open campfire out in the garden. How practical is that, oh apartment dweller? How legal in the drought?

Not only are we looking at a difficult heat source, we are also searching out unusual ingredients. It is all very hip and Californian. I can't tell you how many recipes call for fresh turmeric. I live a few meters from a lovely market in a country that uses fresh turmeric all the time, but I am not the slightest bit interested in shaving and deep frying and otherwise mucking around with a root that looks pretty on the plate but often tastes like mud. If you live in non-California USA you will almost never find fresh turmeric. There are other hard to find ingredients dominating many recipes.

The writing is uneven. I have a hard time deciding which of the three authors is narrating at any given point. One of them writes a long, strange, dull section tracking the hour-by-hour activities of the restaurant staff over a week.

I compare this book with "Relæ" that I reviewed last year. "Relæ" also contained many strange recipes not to try at home but the book itself was a revelation, spelling out the coherent and exciting food theory that compels the restaurant forward. I compare it too to "Flour and Water," a deeply technical book that I found wonderful. These are also from Ten Speed and are joys to read. I can't say what happened here.

I received a review copy of "This is Camino" by Russell Moore, Allison Hopelain, and Chris Colin (Ten Speed) through NetGalley.com. ( )