Extra Sauce: The Good, The Bad, And The Onions
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Zahra Tangorra opened and then closed a beloved Brooklyn restaurant, cooked her father his last meal, left a lover in Tuscany, and wrote about all of it. The result is a memoir that is unguarded to the point of being almost uncomfortable—and, for the right reader, impossible to put down.
The recipes are real and the food is personal: stuffed shells and meatballs from the Long Island Italian-American childhood, chocolate mousse pie from her mother, pea soup from her father. But the cooking here is always in service of the emotional weather, which is considerable. Ruth Reichl calls the prose "lush, fearless, and tender"; the New York Times Book Review compared reading it to sitting with a friend who "always has a rollicking, tragicomic story to tell." Both descriptions are accurate.
If food memoirs built around grief, big love, and hard-won self-knowledge are your thing, this one delivers. If they are not, this is probably not your book—Tangorra is not interested in restraint.
Hardcover.
Published on April 14, 2026
