TK: May Book Club

**Registration will open on 3/1/26

Join Ginger and the team for a lively discussion on this month’s food themed book, Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelson.

Food and drink will be available for purchase during the event and a complimentary snack from the book will be served.

In order to reserve your space, there is a ticket fee of $10. This fee will be used as a credit toward food/drink purchased at book club.

Visit Old Firehouse Books in Old Town to purchase your book – Book Club books purchased at Old Firehouse the month before or month of book club receive a 20% discount for being a part of the Ginger and Baker Book Club!

More about Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelson.

It begins with a simple Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother’s house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations.

Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister—all battling tuberculosis—walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Göteborg, Sweden. It was there that Marcus’s new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.

Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson’s career of  “chasing flavors,” as he calls it, had only just begun—in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most important, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fufilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room—a place where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers, and nurses. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.

With disarming honesty and intimacy, Samuelsson also opens up about his failures—the price of ambition, in human terms—and recounts his emotional journey, as a grown man, to meet the father he never knew. Yes, Chef is a tale of personal discovery, unshakable determination, and the passionate, playful pursuit of flavors—one man’s struggle to find a place for himself in the kitchen, and in the world.

If you are looking to dive into next month’s delicious read, in June we will be reading Butter: A Rich History by Elaine Khosrova. Check out the list for the rest of the year here!

Policies

• Teaching Kitchen Class and In-House Event tickets are non-refundable. If you need to reschedule up to one week before your booked event, please contact us to transfer your ticket to a different event. Within one week of your class, we can only offer a transfer if we are able to re-sell the tickets, as product has already been purchased.  In the case of emergency, please contact us at (970) 286-0503 or teachingkitchen@gingerandbaker.com and we will do our best to accommodate.
• If you would like to transfer your tickets to a different guest, please forward your email confirmation to them and ensure they check in with the name and email address used to purchase the tickets.
• We reserve the right to cancel due to low attendance, inclement weather, or emergency. We will notify all participants by email at least 24 hours prior to the event to let you know of cancellations, and you will have the option to be refunded to the original payment method, or to apply your ticket price to another class or event.