After a one-year hiatus, the much-loved Decatur Book Festival is back.
The event will feature nearly 100 authors and moderators, a street fair with nearly 90 exhibitors, live music, performances and plenty of family-friendly fun. The festival will kick off Oct. 4 with keynote speaker Joyce Carol Oates, followed by a full day of author panels and other activities Oct. 5.
Food lovers are in for a treat, too.
The culinary stage will feature a powerhouse lineup of local and regional talent. During 45-minute sessions, Erika Council, Todd Richards, Anne Byrn, Von Diaz, Suzy Karadsheh and William Dissen each will whip up a dish from their latest cookbook as they chat about their careers and share culinary insights.
Ted Nelson of Gumbo Marketing has been involved with the festival’s culinary stage programming for years and was responsible for securing this year’s cookbook authors. He noted that this year there are quite a few new Southern cookbooks, adding: “We are so lucky to have the books out there and that their authors said yes.”
Full disclosure: I will be moderating the demos and discussions in my capacity as senior editor for food and dining at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is a festival sponsor.
Credit: Danielle Atkins
Credit: Danielle Atkins
First up on the stage will be Anne Byrn, a former AJC food editor and author of numerous books, including “The Cake Mix Doctor,” “American Cake,” “American Cookie” and “Skillet Love.” Her latest, “Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories,” was released in early September.
Byrn, who resides in Nashville, spent three years researching, interviewing, traveling, writing, testing recipes and styling photos for “Baking in the American South.”
After doing all that, “I don’t think baking in other parts of this country can compete with the depth and variety of baking in the South,” she told the AJC.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Baking — biscuits, to be precise — also is the topic of Erika Council’s 2023 debut cookbook, “Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit With Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes.”
Council, who learned to make biscuits working at her grandmother’s famed restaurant, Mama Dip’s Kitchen, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is on everybody’s hot list. Her Bomb Biscuit Co., which started as a pop-up, was among the 50 restaurants across the country named to the 2023 New York Times Restaurant List, as well as the inaugural Atlanta Michelin Guide’s list of Bib Gourmand restaurants.
She also was among this year’s James Beard Award semifinalists in the Best Chef: Southeast category and was announced earlier this month as one of the 13 chefs named to Food & Wine’s 2024 Best New Chefs in America.
Credit: Clay Williams
Credit: Clay Williams
Todd Richards is the founding chef of airport restaurant One Flew South and culinary director of Jackmont Hospitality. In a career spanning nearly 30 years, he has worked for numerous hotels and restaurants, including the Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, the Oakroom at the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, and White Oak Kitchen and Cocktails. He has partnered with and consulted on numerous restaurants and has owned a few of his own, including Richards’ Southern Fried at Krog Street Market and the now defunct Lake & Oak Neighborhood Barbecue.
Richards’ 2018 cookbook, “Soul: A Chef’s Culinary Evolution in 150 Recipes,” offered his personal journey as told through food: raised in Chicago, family visits to Arkansas and a career rooted in the South since the early 1990s. With his second cookbook, “Roots, Heart, Soul: The Story, Celebration, and Recipes of Afro Cuisine in America,” Richards looked beyond U.S. borders.
“I wanted to have a unifying presentation of Afro cuisine,” Richards told the AJC earlier this year. “I wanted to give better celebration to its origins, and the delicious effect on foods in North America, and into Central America and the Caribbean. West African food is the mother of so many cuisines in the United States.”
Credit: Cybelle Codish
Credit: Cybelle Codish
Food historian Von Diaz took a similar approach for her latest project.
Her first cookbook, “Coconuts & Collards: Recipes From Puerto Rico to the Deep South,” focused on recipes she learned growing up in metro Atlanta and during trips to her family’s home in Puerto Rico.
In contrast, her new book, “Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking — 125 Recipes From the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Ocean Islands,” takes us on a gastronomic adventure around the globe to learn about the cuisine on islands, as well as the people who live there.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Suzy Karadsheh and William Dissen offer different approaches to home cooking with their respective cookbooks.
Karadsheh, who lives in Milton, has built a massive following with her social media brand the Mediterranean Dish, for which she shares recipes based on her Egyptian roots and her Jordanian husband’s heritage.
Her new cookbook, “The Mediterranean Dish: Simply Dinner” reimagines traditional Mediterranean recipes for busy lifestyles.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Dissen, meanwhile, is the chef behind several farm-to-table dining spots, including the Market Place Restaurant and Lounge in Asheville, North Carolina. In his “Thoughtful Cooking: Recipes Rooted in the New South,” Dissen encourages home cooks to slow down: “to be in the moment, to take a breath, and to connect.”
While there will be plenty of opportunities for festivalgoers to connect with these cookbook authors, it won’t happen under a tent on Decatur Square as in years past. Instead, cooking demos and discussions will be held at Carreker Hall in First Baptist Church of Decatur.
The move should provide an enhanced experience, said Leslie Wingate, who is in her first year as the festival’s executive director. “The church is very well equipped with A/V and we have the ability to have cameras overhead,” she said. Holding the event inside also eliminates weather concerns.
“The fact that the festival is free, the quality of programming ... and the attendee experience — I just think it is so unique,” Nelson said. “I don’t think there’s another free culinary event that you can go to that [has] this level of professionals.”
Decatur Book Festival Culinary Stage. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Oct. 5. Free. Carreker Hall in First Baptist Church of Decatur, 308 Clairemont Ave., Decatur. decaturbookfestival.com
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