The Milwaukee Cookbook features over 90 online recipes from over 60 chefs released in batches from local Milwaukee chefs. A twist from traditional restaurant cookbooks, the recipes come from chefs’ personal experiences, rather than the restaurants at which they cook.
Photographer and artist Kevin J. Miyazaki is behind the project, with the goal of constructing an easily-accessible cookbook for Milwaukee residents that reaches inside of the homes of local chefs to indirectly showcase Milwaukee’s culinary scene.
“[The cookbook] is a real cross section of restaurants and chefs and cooking that’s happening in Milwaukee right now,” Miyazaki said. “This isn’t a best restaurants list. It’s a very diverse list of places, from smaller restaurants to big, flashy, famous restaurants.”
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The cookbook project began in June 2022 when Miyazaki decided to embark on a project that would highlight Milwaukee chefs and their recipes. Having traveled to places like Hawaii, New York and even Italy for the construction of cookbooks, Miyazaki decided to hone in on the local dining scene in Milwaukee for a change.
In collaboration with Milwaukee Magazine dining editor Ann Christenson and Claire Koenig and Kathryn Lavey from Visit Milwaukee, Miyazaki set out to find the most special dishes cooking in the homes of Milwaukee’s chefs. The pool of chefs includes people from all different backgrounds, races, genders and ethnicities, creating a diverse set of recipes.
“We wanted the mix of chefs to be really diverse,” Christenson said. “We wanted to have male, female, non-gendered individuals and people of color … we just wanted to make sure that there was a lot of representation.”
After the chefs were selected, Miyazaki photographed the chefs and their dishes, and Christenson interviewed them about the stories behind them. Christenson asked about the chefs’ backgrounds and cooking interests, and delved into why the dishes resonate so deeply with them.
“These are pretty personal recipes,” Miyazaki said. “So I was in people’s home kitchens, which was really fun to see them outside of their work lives.”
The cookbook includes a mix of starters and appetizers, entrées, desserts and drink recipes. Chefs were given the opportunity to contribute one or two unique recipes to the book.
After the two years of recipe generation, interviews and photographs, the online cookbook is now available for free on Visit Milwaukee’s website. The digital edition went live Tuesday, and recipes will roll out continuously. A physical copy of the cookbook will be for sale in the fall, but plans for the release have not yet been finalized.
