Has the Restaurant Cookbook Boom Gone Bust?

To understand the evolution of the restaurant cookbook, you have to zoom out. According to a Washington Post report, between 2010 and 2020, cookbook sales grew eight percent year over year. The pandemic increased those figures twofold as people were stuck at home and cooking. While sales have leveled off, they’re not going anywhere: As of 2023, cookbooks are the fourth-largest nonfiction category in the U.S., according to the market research firm Circana, with sales consistently hovering around $20 million per year. (Circana also reported that in 2025 baking books in particular were up 80 percent compared to the year prior.) One indication of popularity has been a wave of new cookbook shops that have opened in the past couple of years, like Wild Sorrel Cookbooks in New York, Binding Agents in Philadelphia, Anchovy Book Co. in St. Louis, and most recently, Patine, a cookbook shop in a San Diego garage.

Looking at the upcoming fall cookbook catalogue, you’ll find plenty of chefs behind major restaurants, but few lean into the restaurant’s name or identity—instead focusing on a more general theme or subject. Among them are Essentially Basque from Caper’s chef-in-residence Ryan Bartlow (Ernesto’s and Bartolo), Taiwanese? from Eric Sze (who owns New York’s Wenwen and 886), All Hours by Kwame Onwuachi (the chef behind Lincoln Center’s Tatiana and Dōgon in D.C.), and Spanish Accent: American Home Recipes with a Spanish Touch from Katie Button (Asheville’s Cúrate Bar de Tapas). This fall, Lucas Sin, who developed a following from his Bon Appétit video series, will publish Cha Chaan Teng: Comfort Food from Hong Kong s Iconic Diners, which will be timed nicely as he goes on to promote his new restaurant, Lok Kee.

That follows a general trend in publishing: Enrique Olvera, the world-renowned Mexican chef, has never published a Pujol-branded cookbook, but he has several on Mexican cooking. Gregory Gourdet didn’t make a cookbook centered on his celebrated Haitian restaurant Kann, in Portland, Oregon, instead debuting Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health; Scott Clark, the owner of Dad’s Luncheonette in Half Moon Bay, California, sold Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip. 

“For me, it’s a lot more about Taiwanese cuisine as a broader topic,” says Sze, whose book is about his relationship to Taiwan filtered through a New York lens. He added that he never envisioned an 886/WenWen cookbook anyway—this version was always the proposal. “Plus, we’re not really a national name so I’d imagine selling those cookbooks would definitely pigeonhole us into a much smaller market.” (Nevertheless, the book provides insights into how the proverbial sausage gets made at his restaurants: He writes that when developing sesame noodles for 886, FamilyMart, the convenience store, provided the “benchmark.”) 

Restaurants were once considered appealing to publishers, even reliable retailers for their books—a publisher might expect to allocate a few thousand copies to a restaurant to sell directly to its customers—that could have an impact on overall sales. But the industry has shifted away from them. Insiders I spoke with suggested several factors as to why—and what’s next.