The Best Cookbook Store

I love this place. I have been shopping here for over 10 years. This cookbook heaven! Trust me as a professional chef I love this place. But you don't need to be a professional chef to have a blast here.
The manager knows me here and always suggest books that interest me.

They are a block south of the subway station at 96th & Lexinton off the 4, 5 or 6 line.

Tell them Marcus Guiliano from Aroma Thyme Bistro sent you!


October 21, 2008, 8:12 PM
Q & A With Nach Waxman
By NICK FOX

Nach Waxman at his bookstore in 1997. (Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times)
If Julia Moskin’s article today whetted your appetite for cookbooks, there’s no better place to go in New York than the Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore.

Nach Waxman, who opened the store at 1435 Lexington Avenue 25 years ago last month, calls it “a repository of books that are not only what you can’t get elsewhere, but beyond what you knew existed.”

It has 13,000 books, but his goal is to be selective, not comprehensive. “You don’t come schlepping up to 93d and Lex if you don’t have something special you want.”


“It isn’t just a cookbook store,” he said. “You can find books on the microbiology of cheese manufacturing, the role of gastronomy in Moliere’s plays. You can find books on kitchen antiques, contemporary agriculture, biotechnology.”

Nach grew up in South Jersey. He studied anthropology at Cornell and Harvard, specializing in India. (Among the store’s many imported and foreign-language books are many from India.) He worked as a nonfiction book editor for about 18 years before opening the store.

“What we’re really trying to do is take one field of human interest and though the books that have been written about it, explore it in all directions.”

Any questions? He’s all yours.