Bookstore launches rockstar chef Virgilio Martinez’s Central

The Kitchen Bookstore has become a favorite of gourmets and gourmands alike.

It started with a frantic 3 a.m. phone call to rant about the bad service of a local bookstore.

Rajiv Daswani, a 24-year-old with an incredible personal collection of over 8,000 books on food, was upset the bookstore, contrary to its name, was not as stocked as it portrayed itself to be, and twice failed to deliver on a promise of finding a specific title for him at their other branches.

“Why don’t you just open your own bookstore?” a half-asleep Miguel Angeles replied.

Cut to a couple of years later and they have not only established a startup online bookstore, they are also slowly becoming a force to contend with in the distribution of food-related books.

Book launch

Just a few weeks ago, they were chosen by Singaporean author Bryan Koh to launch his book on Philippine cuisine, “Milkier Pigs and Violet Gold” (which Daswani describes as “the best book on Philippine cuisine—and it’s not even by a Filipino”).

And this Oct. 30, they will be launching “Central,” the book of Virgilio Martinez, currently hailed as Latin America’s best chef.

Daswani shares while initially they wanted to put up a real bookstore, they realized they might not be able to fully commit to manning a store and fall into the same bad habits that propelled the desire to open their own bookstore.

Hard-to-find books are now available online.

The millennial solution: An online shop.

After tedious programming and many letters to publishers, The Kitchen Bookstore has become a favorite of gourmets and gourmands alike. First of all, you skip the hassle of traffic just to go to a real bookstore. You can browse through their selection of books 24/7.

They also offer to look for the book for you if it is not on their list. If you are doing a paper on, say, Doreen Fernandez, they will go the extra mile looking for that out-of-print book to try to get it to you.

Signed books

Best of all—and I say best because I collect food books myself—they give you the added value of signed books. Yes, the book that you will buy from TheKitchenBookstore.com will have the autograph of the author of the book. Obviously not if the author is dead—LOL—but if the author is alive and especially if he or she is Manila-based, your book will come with a signature of the author himself/herself.

The website indicates if a book is signed or not. All of Felice Sta. Maria’s books sold via The Kitchen Bookstore, for instance, are signed. Cebu-based author Louella Alix has also signed copies of her book “Hikay: The Culinary Heritage of Cebu” for The Kitchen Bookstore’s distribution.

Hard-to-find books are now available online.

Virgilio Martinez

The Oct. 30 book launch of “Latin America’s best chef” Virgilio Martinez  will be at Shangri-La at The Fort at 3 p.m. Martinez is the chef and owner of Central Restaurante in Lima, Peru.

The launch will be open to the public. “We are opening this event to the public for free so that everyone can participate,” says Tetta Tirona, founder of Power of the Pen, who is organizing the event.

The last time Martinez was here was during the very successful Madrid Fusion Manila and he wowed audiences with his passionate lecture on Peruvian cuisine and his dedication to their local produce. The side dinner he participated in, however (not related to Madrid Fusion), was criticized for being just a marketing tool to promote the organizer and the restaurant he cooked at, with a prohibitive price tag of over P10,000 per plate, allegedly to cover the cost for VIPs and international media who ate for free.

Props to The Kitchen Bookstore and Stram Events for recognizing that Martinez has an audience bigger than the see-and-be-seen-eating crowd. They are the aspiring chefs, culinary students, home cooks, and food lovers in general, who will benefit much from listening to this chef hailed as a culinary genius.

Online bookstore

If you miss the launch, you can get the book online at TheKitchenBookstore.com. The online store now has close to 100 food-related books and it is slowly but surely expanding the list.

Slowly, because Daswani wants to distribute only books that he would collect himself. He has, in fact, turned down offers to distribute some cookbooks, admitting there are certain titles he would never put on his own shelf.

The result is a well-curated collection that will surely satisfy the voracious appetite of food lovers who are into literature as well.

For sure, it was a pretty impressive result for a 3 a.m. rant.