Review: Coastal Is a Culinary Love Letter to California's Central Coast
The cookbook offers everyday inspiration to get creative and elevate the ordinary.
Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip is a lavishly illustrated how-to manual for making ghee, lox tacos, rhubarb brownies, grilled eggplant yakitori, bacon-fat roasted turnips, and much more. It's also a love letter to California's central coast. Author Scott Clark is a college dropout who cooked at multiple hoity-toity restaurants before opening his own place—Dad's Luncheonette—in a rented caboose on California's Pacific Coast Highway.
A mix of classic American comfort food and crunchy-Californian dishes with multicultural flair, Coastal borrows ample inspiration and ingredients from Mexican, Japanese, French, Korean, and other cuisines. He gives fresh takes on familiar foods—red miso caramel apples, matcha mochi waffles—along with more adventurous fare (head cheese with charred onion mustard, anyone?).
These recipes are "project cooking"—unlikely to be your go-to weeknight meals. Still, Coastal offers everyday inspiration to get creative and elevate the ordinary.
A "visual storybook of free-spirited California living," Coastal introduces readers to not just recipes but the folks who make them possible, including sea vegetable foragers, wild boar hunters, regenerative farmers, and organic winemakers. It's a cookbook, but it's also a reminder of what makes America great: its melting pot of cultures, its natural beauty and abundance, its capacity to accommodate reinvention, and, of course, some perfectly crunchy potato chips.
