Everything Is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes

One of Esquire’s Best Cookbooks of 2020 and one of The Washington Post’s Best Food Books of 2020

In epigrammatic, nearly poetic diction, Grant … reminds us of how transformative the junctures where food and life collide can be. –The New York Times Book Review

What a beautiful, rich, and poetic memoir this is … Like the best chefs, Phyllis Grant knows how to make a masterpiece from a few simple ingredients: truth, taste, poignancy, and love. –Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat, Pray, Love

Phyllis Grant’s Everything Is Under Control is a memoir about appetite as it comes, goes, and refocuses its object of desire. Grant’s story follows the sometimes smooth, sometimes jagged, always revealing contours of her life: from her days as a dancer struggling to find her place at Julliard, to her experiences in and out of four-star kitchens in New York City, to falling in love with her future husband and leaving the city after 9/11 for California, where her children are born. All the while, a sense of longing pulses in each stage as she moves through the headspace of a young woman longing to be sustained by a city into that of a mother now sustaining a family herself.

Written with the transparency of a diarist, Everything Is Under Control is an unputdownable series of vignettes followed by tried-and-true recipes from Grant’s table–a heartrending yet unsentimental portrait of the highs and lows of young adulthood, motherhood, and a life in the kitchen.