Kitchen Arts and Letters

This month we have a Q&A with the wonderful Matt Sartwell, the owner of Kitchen Arts and Letters. Kitchen Arts and Letters is a NYC bookstore dedicated to exploring food, and features a diverse and inclusive collection of books from around the world.

If we were to open a book about you, what would it say?

Well, as always with a book, you want to know who the book is for.

Depending on who the audience is, this story might be different. But, in the broadest possible terms. I grew up in a small town in Oregon and I came to New York fresh out of college. I wanted to work in publishing as an editor and I got a job. I started working and had a chance to edit a lot of books.

After a while, however, I grew restless. I realized a lot of my time was spent not editing books, but sitting in meetings, arguing over budgets, trying to get advertising money for a book that I cared about. And the time I was supposed to spend editing, I had to do at home or on the weekends or in the evenings. Office time was about the other stuff. So, I left that job with an idea that I would just become a freelance editor.

A friend of mine worked for a woman who was one of the founders of the store. Marion Waxman was working at book of the month club, and she was married to Nach Waxman. Nach was the mastermind behind the store. He was here every day, and they needed a clerk. So, I started doing a little bit of work to get out of the house because, as you probably know, sometimes when you're focused on writing, the world can sort of close in on you. 

You know, you go out at 6:30 to pick up some milk and you're like, “Oh my God, there are people out here.”  So, it was good to be able to get out of the house. I discovered being involved in the act of selling and connecting people to books that really did what they wanted them to. And that was really satisfying to me.

It was a big part of what I had liked about editing in a way, the idea of getting something to the point where it’s speaking to a particular audience, but the satisfactions were more immediate. And so, I kept working here more often and started turning down editorial projects.

Eventually I became a store manager and then partner, and I've been here 30 years.

It's important to like what you do. It allows you to keep reapproaching the subject often, and to try and keep freshening your approach and not to get sort of setting your ways.

What is something you wish to see in food writing that you either haven't encountered or haven't seen enough of?

With the world being as big as it is there's a lot that hasn't happened.  I think I'm encouraged by seeing books on certain cuisines that used to be treated as part of a larger whole being broken out. Ten or fifteen years ago, if you wanted a book on Peruvian food, you bought a South American cookbook. And now there are Peruvian cookbooks.

Peru is probably the best example from South America, but they're becoming more common. It's still a lot of traction there and I think doesn't take much looking at a general South American book to realize that the food of Southern Chile and the food Venezuela don't have necessarily a lot of overlap other than vocabulary. So those things are becoming richer, and publishers are slowly paying attention to them.

We have a book on the food of Sub-Saharan Africa and not like the whole thing, but really the belt of countries right under the Sahara. That's really difficult material to find in English. So, we're happy to see that happening.

I think that's going to continue because people's travel access and their curiosity are growing greater. People's curiosity is growing greater.

Also, books don't happen without somebody basically giving something up to write them. They may ultimately reap some rewards of it, but it's not like you get a stipend when you're writing a book. You have to be able to rearrange your life in order to make a book happen. People are doing that, and interesting things are happening.

What are some things that have stuck with you throughout the years? Whether it's like a book or a quote, or like a way of living?

Well, let's see. I mean, there are books here that are still on the shelf and still active that we were happily selling and recommending.

When I came to work here, Taste of Country Cooking is one, but there's a simple Italian book called Cucina Fresca, a book that was published in 1985 but a classic I still recommend to people. Sometimes a book will come along and really capture something that people keep coming back to and that's great. Not every book that does that stays in print, unfortunately. And sometimes a book that was so eye opening in its day becomes so much a part of the landscape that it’s less relevant because everybody takes its message to heart.

To use an incredibly mundane example: once upon a time, there were dozens of books on how to use a microwave. We had a whole section of the store for microwave cookbooks. Now I don't think we have any, because microwaves just became something that people knew how to use. They take them for granted. And so, the landscape changes, and I think it'll continue to change. I wish I could predict exactly how other things will become part of the landscape. But yeah, the train is always evolving.

Have you had any unusual requests?

The more common, unusual ones are along the lines of:

“My grandmother came to this country. When, you know, she was a new bride, and she always made this dish, and everybody loved it. But of course, she never wrote it down and now she's gone, and we want to make it. But we're not sure exactly what it was called because she only spoke whatever language and her English was not so good. She just, you know, she didn't like to answer questions.”

Those are the most frequent types of questions that lead us down rabbit holes, whether it's some sort of baked good or it's a stew or anything else in between.

And other times grandma was just a great cook, and she came up with something on her own. It was personal and you're not going to find a book that does it the same.

So, there isn't always an answer other than, grandma was a great cook. And sometimes you love a dish because your grandma made it for you.

So, is there anything that you would like to add that I haven't necessarily touched upon with my questions?

There are five of us who work here now coming from different backgrounds, but there's no way we can represent the whole of human experience. So, we always want people to feel like can come in and say,

“Hey, I bet you never heard of this one before. I was in this place when my car broke down and this family took me in. They fed me this dish and it was killer and I want to make it again.” Or the grandma's secret recipe questions.

I think that's all-fair territory. And maybe we won't hit it on the nose, but maybe we can find enough information that somebody can feel like we’re acknowledging and paying attention to their inquiry dish and what it may represent.

Book List and Links:

Check out some of the books mentioned during our interview with Matt!

Sifratna: Recipes from Our Yemeni Kitchen by Amjaad Al Hussain

Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis

The Edna Lewis Cookbook by Edna Lewis

Bibi’s Kitchen by Hawa Hassan

Cucina Fresca by Viana La Place  

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