Chef-Authors, Taiwan, Smaller Formats & Comfort Food: The Food Books of 2023

Another strong year for food writing, particularly from Ireland, but what are the common threads in cook book publishing this year?

It’s funny, Substack is a digital writing platform, a hefty chunk of our work lives on social media channels and effectively we’ve played out our entire careers online, but there’s still something enduring and untouchable about physical writing.

The melodic rustle of flipping newspaper pages, the creativity squeezed into pocket-sized zines featured heart-poured-out personal essays, and the heft and freshly-printed scent of a brand new cookbook as you draw your palm over its hardback cover and un-stiffen the pages for the first time. We’re all still a bit old school at heart when it comes to books, aren’t we?

Digital is fabulous and for sure the basis of the future, but at the tail end of every year we fence off a few weeks to gather our thoughts on that year’s publishing efforts. 2023 has been no exception and there’s been a number of threads emerging in publishing this year which we’re eager to extrapolate. Note: we haven’t linked to any of these books directly, you can purchase/order them wherever you want, but we do have the full list of 15 top 2023 books detailed on gastrogays.com (free to access, but does include affiliate links).

Kristin Jensen: The Disruptive Personality of Publishing in 2023

Once again, like 2022 and, in some ways, 2021 too, the disruptor in Irish publishing is Kristin Jensen (of

Well Read & Well Fed

on Substack and the one woman visionary behind Nine Bean Rows) who continues to be the lead story, by all accounts. Her hands have been over so many productions - as publisher, copy editor and co-writer, no less - and her fledgling publishing house has arguably been behind the best of the best. From her ground-breaking kickstarter success in 2021, it was 2022 that properly solidified her prowes. First, the formative (and later award-winning) first series of pint-sized quarterly Blasta Books from new voices in publishing (ourselves included) which was followed by a number of full-colour, full-size cookbooks brought from initial spark through to shelf space: Gaz Smith and Rick Higgins’ ‘And For Mains’ (with Nicola Brady) and Graham Herterich’s ‘Bake’.

In 2023, this dominance only deepened with a second Blasta series - four more books (Soup; Tapas; Wasted; Masarap) with four more to follow in ‘24 - and several standalone books, from cocktails (Oisín Davis’ ‘Irish Kitchen Cocktails’) to charity books and somehow Jensen managed to spearhead two issues of new food writing zine Scoop AND deliver a rousing call to arms ‘To Niche!’ at Food On The Edge… Jensen’s energy know no bounds, and, unbelievably, this is still only the beginning. How lucky we all are to witness what’s to come down the line.

Beyond the Pass: Chef Books