“Most people are capable of feeding themselves without recipes, so if they are buying a book, they want to go deeper than that,” says Matt Sartwell, managing partner of the New York City bookstore Kitchen Arts & Letters. Since 1983, this beloved food and drink specialist has been satiating the appetites of the culinary curious from Julia Child to acclaimed chefs Massimo Bottura, Andrew Carmellini, and Marc Vetri to home cooks, students, food journalists, and authors.
Founder Nach Waxman, now semi-retired, had considered a sports theme for his single topic bookshop before settling on cooking. Sartwell joined Waxman in 1991, and together they’ve managed to grow their global clientele despite the massive presence of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. “One of the ways we adapted was by working harder to find books that were being published outside of the mainstream big houses.”
