A restaurant’s cookbook is naturally an extension of the experience of a restaurant—meant to visually interpret the mood, the ambience, the idea and the flavor. We designed this book for both the determined dreamers and the determined cooks, boosting recipe sizes for kitchen-counter-distance reading, and adding charts of botanical evolution and flavor families, all in a signature color palette and tall format. Because Dianne Forley, chef and proprietor of New York City’s Verbena restaurant, approached this book by building meals based on flavor families, we commissioned Victor Schrager to shoot tantalizing portraits of food as ingredients rather than as plated dishes. This was to underscore the chef’s approach to food as a botanical adventure, rather than a styling fest.

Certainly a cookbook that encourages preparing wholesome food from the local farmer’s market is pretty darn environmentally responsible. Not to mention good for you, too!