Cookbooks are rarely about food alone. They’re about a way of seeing, of living, of giving shape to appetites that extend beyond the plate. The King Cookbook—written by Clare de Boer, Jess Shadbolt, and Annie Shi, the trio behind the SoHo restaurant King—is one such volume. On its face, it’s a collection of recipes from their much-lauded kitchen on King Street, but between the instructions for blanching cavolo nero and the meditations on anchovies, you find something else: a philosophy of cooking rooted in generosity, restraint, and conviviality.
For Hudson Valley readers, the local tether is de Boer, who, when she’s not writing or cooking in New York City, is running Stissing House, the 18th-century tavern turned restaurant in Pine Plains. Since opening in 2022, Stissing House has become one of the region’s great dining rooms—where roasted ducks and apple tarts emerge from the open hearth and de Boer’s hand with fire and flavor is unmistakable. Her presence in the Valley gives this new book a resonance that extends beyond Manhattan. The same sensibility that animates Stissing House—seasonal, precise, yet entirely unpretentious—runs through these pages.
The friendship at the center of the book began in London, where de Boer and Shadbolt met working at the River Cafe. That restaurant, tucked along the Thames in Hammersmith, is one of those crucibles of modern food culture: fiercely seasonal, Italian in spirit if not in postcode, and the training ground for a generation of chefs. De Boer and Shadbolt absorbed the River Cafe’s ethos of rigor and simplicity—greens blanched until sweet, olive oil poured in unapologetic glugs, beans treated with the reverence usually reserved for prime rib. That’s where their bond was forged, and it became the seed of King. When Shadbolt and de Boer crossed the Atlantic, they were joined by Annie Shi, a finance-world escapee with a taste for restaurants and an appetite that matched their own.
In 2016, the three opened King in SoHo, with no prior experience of New York’s dining scene, which might have been madness if it hadn’t worked out so beautifully. King is the kind of restaurant where the menu changes daily, scribbled on parchment in Sharpie, where carta di musica—paper-thin Sardinian flatbread—is offered freely at the start of a meal, a gesture of welcome before the ordering even begins. It’s a restaurant designed to stretch the evening, to have you forgetting time as the plates and glasses accumulate.
The cookbook channels that spirit. It begins, as the restaurant does, with a pantry: olive oils (Tuscan, Californian), anchovies rinsed and dried with monk-like patience, borlotti beans, lemons, bottarga. These aren’t fetish objects so much as workhorses, the building blocks of a cuisine that celebrates simplicity while refusing shortcuts. Recipes unfold like a curriculum, teaching readers to blanch greens until they yield to olive oil, to smash beans into velvet, to coax emulsions into stability.
One of the striking things about The King Cookbook is its refusal to become a lifestyle object. As Shi writes in the introduction, this isn’t a memoir or a coffee-table tome. It’s meant to be splattered with sauce, its margins scribbled with substitutions. The point isn’t to reproduce King’s menu exactly but to absorb its ethos: Cook with what you have, let the season guide you, and trust in the transformative power of good oil, beans, and herbs.
That ethos will be on display when de Boer, Shadbolt, and Shi gather at Oblong Books in Millerton on November 8 to launch the book at 2pm. For de Boer, it’s a homecoming of sorts—bringing a piece of King Street to the quiet corner of Dutchess County where she’s built Stissing House into a hearth for the region. The book, like the restaurants, is an invitation: come sit, eat, stay a little longer than intended.
