These recipes are very good, divided into the chapters:

Appetizers, soups, and breakfast: 18 such as Salade Nicoise, Gravlax, steak tartare, onion soup gratinee
Fish and Shellfish: 23 such as Bouillabaisse, Sole en Papillote, Grilled swordfish, Koulibiac
Chicken and Game: 10 such as Coq au Vin, Duck a l'Orange, Cassoulet, rabbit Moutarde
Meat: 15 such as Steak Frites, steak au poivre, Pork Milanese, Glazed pork belly, Choucroute Garnie
Vegetables and Sides: 20 such as French Fries, Potato Gratin, Potato gnocchi, spaetzle, onion rings
Desserts: 9 such as Crème Brulee, Profiteroles, French Apple Tart, Pavlova, Lemon Mille-Feuille

You get the picture. If you have any three French cookbooks chosen at random, you will probably have recipes for over half of these dishes already. I am really surprised there is no recipe for an omlet.

Good reasons for buying this book are:
- Resource for an entertaining menu based on a French brasserie theme.
- Source of several very good general entertaining recipes, especially dishes like Pot au Feu, Choucroute Garnie, and Bouillabaisse which may have three or four different types of protein. This is very well suited to groups with varied tastes.
- Source for some brasserie recipes which one may not find in French cookbooks, such as the Italian and German influenced dishes of gnocchi, spaetzle, and choucroute garnie.

On the plus side, this is a very attractively prepared book and the recipes are adapted to being prepared at home. I wish, in fact, that the authors would have been truer to their restaurant methods. I have always believed that one of the many things a home cook can learn from restaurant practice is how to be economical with ingredients. In some preparations involving mushrooms, they say to discard the stems. I will bet good money that in the restaurant they put the stems into their vegetable stock pot.

There are several editorial gafes I have come to expect in Clarkson Potter books. This book introduces some new ones. First, the titles of the recipes begin the book all in French (with no English translation) and somewhere in the middle of fish and shellfish, they switch to English (with no French translation). From that point on, they switch back an forth between English and French almost randomly. Second, after carefully laying out pages so that everything relevant to a recipe is on two facing pages, they leave sidebars for one dish to slip over onto the next pair of pages. Third, the forward by Robert Hughes repeats material in Keith McNally's introduction. I guess he thought nobody reads Forewords. Fourth, the Foreward says most restaurants avoid swordfish, yet there on page 74 is a recipe for grilled swordfish. Sacre Bleu!

These are all minor gaffs, and I give Hughes special credit for the overall quality of his essay. It is clearly superior to similar material in a recent gloss on the life of his Manhatten restaurants by Daniel Boulud. This brings an interesting contrast to Balthazar's food to what you will find in Café Boulud, especially since the joint chefs at Balthazar cite Boulud as their mentor. While both are firmly based in French cuisine, they are clearly based on two different styles of French cooking. Brasserie cooking was designed to be a type of fast, inexpensive food while Boulud's haute cuisine is meant for serious sit down sessions of marathon eating and drinking. The result is that to my taste, having all the time in the world to cook, I find Boulud's dishes much more inviting from their descriptions on the printed page than do Balthazar's brasserie fare. But that's me.

The photography is comptetant with the usual fuzziness in the closeups and the usual absence of captions. Sigh. The overall design of the book is very clever and bright, easy to read, and, I suppose, based on the look of the Balthazar menu.

Overall, it is very well done and a worthy purchase. Just be careful to evaluate how you expect it will complement your needs and your cookbook collection.

24 of 24 found the following review helpful:

Excellent Book  Jan 05, 2004
By Reza Pazooki "macchap"
This is one of the best cookbooks I've purchased in a long time (and I buy a lot of them!). I buy restaurant cookbooks mainly for inspiration, since the recipes are often too complex to be prepared at home. I was pleasantly surprised when I started thumbing through the Baltahzar Cookbook - there where a number of dishes that I wanted to try right away. The dishes certainly aren't simple, but if you're not afraid of making your own veal stock or planning ahead to marinate duck legs in wine overnight, you should have a lot of fun with these recipes.

For those who've eaten at Balthazar, the book brings back found memories. For those who haven't, the excellent forward, and great pictures provide a real sence of what this great restaruant has to provide. Truly "comfort food" at its best.

19 of 19 found the following review helpful:

A favorite, though a bit involved.  Mar 07, 2004
By Dave Faris
While I don't think this book would be good for novice cooks, this is a great introductory book for classic French cooking.

I've tried several recipes, and have been happy with the results of all of them. The recipes do seem to be a bit involved and called for some expensive ingredients, but it's unlikely you'll be making many of the recipes frequently, so for special occasions, it's worth the extra trouble. And the trouble pays off in spades. For example, I made the recipe for braised short ribs, which were quite delicious. As an added bonus, though, the recipe made enough delicious gravy that I froze in tiny containers and ended up serving along side steaks and beef for the next two months.

Finally, I also really like the look of the book, which is evocative of the golden age of food extravagance, in Edwardian books published 100 or more years ago. It's full of beautiful photographs, and could probably be right at home on a hardcore foodie's coffee table.

18 of 19 found the following review helpful:

A great great book  Dec 03, 2003
By JCCOURT "jimcwashdc"
If you have ever been to Balthazar on a Saturday night and had their Short Ribs and thought, "if only I could make these," then you need to buy this book. It has all of the great receipes of the restaurant and are not too complicated to make. The receipies might be a bit spendy to prepare but beat the price of flying to NYC, booking a hotel, and trying to get a reservation at the restaurant before 11:00 pm. A great deal on the book as my local bookstore in Washington, DC had the book at $39.00.

13 of 15 found the following review helpful:

A Great collection of classic cafe fare...  Apr 12, 2005
By JR Pinto
This cookbook is for the person who loves French cafés in general, and Balthazar in specific. In France, cafés are everywhere, and they are the center of social life much the same way as pubs are in England - the difference is that the food at the average English pub is terrible and the food at the average French café is great. Menus may vary from café to café, but there are certain standard items that they tend to have in common. Many consider Balthazar the best French café in New York. The irony is that - in France - cafés are informal and inexpensive places, whereas Balthazar is expensive, usually requires reservations, and almost has a celebrity or two eating there. What makes Balthazar a café is that it serves all the standard café fare, but with it's own unique touch.

What makes The Balthazar Cookbook so great is that it is a compendium of all the classic café items: "Steak Frites," "Moules a la Mariniere," and "Escargots with Garlic Butter," just to name a few. These aren't run-of-the-mill recipes, but Balthazar's own special ones. This is both the book's virtue and its vice. This is not a cookbook for the novice chef. Most of the recipes are fabulously complicated. It assumes that you have the basic skills of cooking as it does not go over simple procedures. It assumes that you have a well-stocked kitchen because many of the recipes call for specialized hardware like Dutch ovens and candy thermometers. It also assumes that you have access to hoity-toity gourmet food stores where you can get all of their obscure ingredients.

I attempted the basic café dish: Steak Frites. The steak was no problem as it is just grilled. What makes this special is the herb butter Balthazar puts on top. I cheated and used bottled sage and chives instead of fresh, and it still came out pretty good. The French fries proved more difficult as they require a thermometer to tell you when the peanut oil (I substituted vegetable) reaches EXACTLY 370 degrees for the first frying and 380 degrees for the second. I didn't have a thermometer so I guessed - the result was that they were nowhere near as good as the fries at Balthazar, which could be the best in the city. With fries you need mayonnaise. I had two failed attempts at making mine in the food processor (as they suggest) before moving on to the blender, which worked fine.

In the end, this is an excellent cookbook. It's only problem is that, for casual food, it takes a LOT of preparation.

See all 16 customer reviews on Amazon.com