East Village Cookbook has become an unlikely phenomenon among collectors.
Photo: Ryan John Lee
The hopeful trope is that cookbooks remain a bright spot within the otherwise-troubled publishing industry. The hundreds of high-production, gorgeous tomes produced in 2025 included new books by Alison Roman, Samin Nosrat, and Molly Yeh; Joshua McFadden’s follow-up to his Six Seasons blockbuster; and even an ode to the Steak House, by Eric Wareheim. But the year’s top-selling cookbook at Matt Sartwell’s Kitchen Arts & Letters on the Upper East Side was something else entirely, a comb-bound community cookbook that was only supposed to be a collection of crowd-sourced recipes printed out and stapled together to raise a little money for a soup kitchen and food pantry. Instead, East Village Cookbook has become a certified hit, found a global audience, won an award for its design, and — crucially — remains in demand. “Every few weeks, Matt orders more books for Kitchen Arts & Letters and we pack up more cases in the church basement and drive them up to the store,” says chef, author, and one of the cookbook’s creators Will Horowitz.
If you crossed a zine with a Junior League Charleston Receipts, you would get East Village Cookbook, whose subtitle — Adventures, Anecdotes and Tales of a Downtown New York Neighborhood Told Through Our Food — actually doesn’t do enough to capture the richness, fullness, and proud “weirdness” of the book itself. “The mishmash of different cultures and palates is evocative of community cookbooks of my childhood in the 1970s,” says Gloria Kusano, a schoolteacher and cookbook collector in Toronto, who discovered the book on a chef’s Instagram feed and was taken with the neighborhood focus. “The breadth and collaboration of neighborhood mom-and-pop shops, hipster ideations, and celebrity establishments sharing their coveted recipes is what makes this such a special cookbook.”
The book got its start during the COVID lockdown, when Horowitz, middle-school teacher Dan Hyatt, and Reverend Will Kroeze from Trinity Lower East Side bonded during dog walks in Tompkins Square Park. They took the long history of community cookbooks as their inspiration to raise funds for Trinity’s Services and Food for the Homeless, now marking its 40th anniversary of dishing up a hot lunch five days a week and running a food pantry; 200,000 meals a year are served. During a surge of asylum seekers arriving in New York, the nearly 200-year-old church on the park at Ninth Street was serving 400 to 500 people daily.
The three began posting “recipes needed” flyers around the neighborhood, which led to EV Grieve writing a story. That caught the attention of Champions, a design firm on Avenue A (whose past clients include the Girl Scouts and the MTV VMAs) that had been looking for a “give-back” to cement its connection to the neighborhood where it has had offices for a decade and a half. “When we offered our services, they were thinking a stapled book, half-letter size, with all community recipes,” says designer Michael McCaughley. “When we learned about the soup kitchen and all the incredible work they did on a daily basis, we decided on a more ambitious design.” Champions chose the classic community-cookbook template as a jumping-off point, honoring that legacy while adding real polish. “Black ink on white paper is the one continuity; the vellum dust jacket is the most premium aspect of the production,” he says. (McCaughley, who is from Dublin, and his mom, Marian, also contributed a recipe for a chicken-broccoli bake.) Horowitz was also able to corral the editor from his William Morrow–published book Salt, Smoke, Time to take on “editing the whole book pro bono,” which is partly why the book’s recipes work so well and the index is so useful.
A flyer asking for recipes.
Photo: Courtesy of the subject
Brooks Headley’s pepperoni sweet potatoes have become a regular addition to my table. Veselka contributed recipes for its meat-stuffed cabbage and its mushroom-stuffed cabbage. Momofuku Noodle Bar’s spicy cucumbers are there as well. So are notecards for banana nut bread and “our great-grandma’s oatmeal cookies” from local residents Lara and Nina Burns. Alan Cumming provided a narrative recipe for stovies — “a Scottish dish traditionally made with beef dripping, but I am vegan so I have made up my own version,” he says — while neighborhood artifacts like the Landmarks Preservation marker for Charlie Parker’s residence get their own pages. Carrot-ginger salad dressing is credited to “every single East Village sushi restaurant in the Eighties.” (And of course there are lemon bars, requisite in any community cookbook.)
“The book is staying true to the neighborhood it represents, a part of NYC that is sadly waning,” says Wylie Dufresne, who contributed his family’s recipe for Thanksgiving stuffing. “It’s not really even about the recipes. It’s more a compilation of the oral traditions of the East Village put down on paper. Much like the East Village itself, the book is a holdout against the way things seem to be heading, which is the best compliment I can give it!”
The book is available on the church’s website as a premium for a donation ($32 to $1,000), but it might have languished like so many Pride of Peoria–esque compilations if not for Sartwell, who tends to celebrate passion projects. “He carried the book as a nonprofit for the first months, sending us a check as a donation,” explains Horowitz, who says that in addition to the social-media reach of the included chefs — orders have come in from as far away as the Netherlands and South Africa — getting the cookbook into Kitchen Arts & Letters has been crucial to its success.
“If it had been all fancy restaurants, it wouldn’t have resonance,” Sartwell says. “People who grew up in the East Village contributed recipes that have been in their families for generations. New York is a hard city to distill, but not that neighborhood.” He adds that it is one of the most satisfying books to sell because the design, “a slick spin on the classic,” feels exactly right. He also notes the East Village aspect of its origin story: “a nice Jewish boy teaming up with a Lutheran church.”
Don Lindgren, of the Maine-based vintage-cookbook seller Rabelais, is on his third volume of an encyclopedia of community cookbooks. He considers East Village an essential addition to the canon: of and by a community and for a good cause. It reminded him of an earlier New York compilation: Greenwich Village Gourmet: Favorite Recipes of 100 Village Artists, Writers, Musicians and Theatre People, published in 1949. That book includes Pete Seeger’s fried rice, Milton Avery’s “basic spaghetti,” Eleanor Roosevelt’s huckleberry pudding, and Chaim Gross’s gefilte fish. East Village, by contrast, showcases “real” residents as well as famous names and restaurants.
“I think we’re all tired of high-production, high-polish food,” says Marco Canora, who sold East Village Cookbook at his restaurant Hearth during the holidays — he contributed recipes for broth and stracciatella soup — and went through his supply quickly. “Especially with this AI slop we’re heading into, it feels handmade; it feels old-world.”
