Recipes from a very small kitchen by a man with a very large talent.

Nobody better embodies the present-day mantra "Eat real food in season" than David Tanis, one of the most original voices in American cooking. For more than a quarter-century, Tanis has been the chef at the groundbreaking Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, where the menu consists solely of a single perfect meal that changes each evening. Tanis’s recipes are down-to-earth yet sophisticated, simple to prepare but impressive on the plate.

Tanis opens this soulful, fun-to-read cookbook with his own private food rituals, those treats—jalapeño pancakes, beans on toast, pasta for one—for when you are on your own in the kitchen with no one else to satisfy. Then he follows with twenty incomparable menus (five per season) that serve four to six. Each transports the reader to places far and wide. And for grand occasions, a time for the whole tribe to gather around the table, Tanis delivers festive menus for holiday feasts. So in one book, Heart of the Artichoke and Other Kitchen Journeys exist three kinds of cooking: small, medium, and large.

Six months a year, David Tanis is head chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, where he’s been since the 1980s, helping to define the restaurant’s wildly influential style. He spends the other half of the year in Paris, where he hosts dinners of international renown. David’s French kitchen is a six-by-ten-foot galley with a rickety stove, a small sink, little counter space, and a half-dozen well-used pots and pans. Tanis has been featured in The New York Times, Gourmet, and Saveur.