[Kitchen Arts & Letters has hung on during the pandemic, and
co-owner Matt Sartwell is ready for an exciting next chapter.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A NEW YORK CITY COOKBOOK STORE SURVIVES  
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Matt Rodbard
November 23, 2020
Taste Cooking
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_ Kitchen Arts & Letters has hung on during the pandemic, and
co-owner Matt Sartwell is ready for an exciting next chapter. _

Matt Sartwell, Kitchen Arts and Letters , Nick Hensley

 

“I don’t wake up at 3:30 and wonder how I’m going to pay the
bills,” Matt Sartwell admits when I ask him, more urgently than
usual, how things are going. Because for a time, when the pandemic
started to rage through New York City, shuttering Manhattan stores and
restaurants, the future of his legendary Upper East Side cookbook
store, Kitchen Arts & Letters, was truly on thin ice. The relief came
not just from the store’s wise shift of resources to digital sales,
but from the customers who have visited over the past 37 years,
browsing the shelves for both new and rare food and drink books and
periodicals. Almost overnight, a GoFundMe raised more than $100,000 to
cover back rent and existing debts, giving Sartwell and his business
partner, Nach Waxman, some breathing room.   

“I feel like I can take risks again,” Sartwell says. This
financial security has allowed him to stock some of the more obscure
books that have been the store’s calling card. Another calling card
is the uncanny ability of the owners and employees to recommend the
perfect book for every possible category of cookbook buyer, from the
busy sous-chef looking for an introduction to a new cuisine to the
home cook interested in getting started.

“We can invest in smaller authors and unusual books, and keep the
store more diverse,” Sartwell tells me. While the fundraiser did
serve as a lifeline, and the store was able to renew their lease with
favorable terms, the pandemic still carries on, and foot traffic to
the small store isn’t close to the levels of early March. Here,
Sartwell talks candidly about the past several months and offers some
suggestions for food and drinks books he’s hoping will come to form
in the next several years.

As a bonus, he shares some of his favorite books of the season, and
he’s offering TASTE readers 15 percent off their next Kitchen Arts &
Letters purchase between now and December 15 with the code
“tastekal.”

How is the store doing, and how are you doing personally?

Once we went into lockdown mode in mid-March and had to shut the door,
everything changed pretty radically. We saw a huge falloff in street
traffic. There just weren’t people coming into the store, and
business was down to begin with. Once we were solely online, I began
scrambling to make that work better. We did a number of targeted
mailings to our lists, suggesting books in certain categories—we did
a list on books for cooking with kids, because we figured a lot of
people were home with their kids and wanted activities that they could
do together.

It didn’t come close to replacing the kind of business that we would
normally do, but it gave us some activity. [Cofounder] Nach Waxman and
I made the decision early not to lay anybody off, so we were
continuing to pay our staff through the whole time. We only had
part-timers, and they all made the rest of their living in restaurant
work, which, of course, stopped happening. We didn’t feel like we
could abandon them; we also knew that they were important to the way
that our customers viewed us. So it was stressful.

For a while, I was the only one coming in to the store, coming in
every day to fill website orders, and my family freaked out about that
a little bit, and I had to agree to come in only every other day. So
we sort of went through all the COVID-related anxiety that everybody
else did. We were able to reopen at the end of June, and we started
seeing some foot traffic, but not much.

When you reopened in June, what kind of business were you doing?

Um . . . 30 percent, maybe. And certainly not from foot traffic. We
were seeing two to three people coming in the store. A day. People
were just incredibly cautious and careful about going out in the
world. So, it really wasn’t keeping the roof over our heads. And I
was emptying bank accounts and pouring it into the store to keep up
with our suppliers, and we were getting in bad shape on rent and
things like that. We knew when we got to the end of the summer, and we
didn’t have the usual things that made fall big blockbuster seasons,
that we had to do something. And that’s why I set up the GoFundMe
campaign, which blew up in a way that I never really anticipated, and
for which I’m incredibly grateful.

Let me ask you—when you hit that $100,000 point—what was the
feeling that you had inside? What were the emotions for you and Nach?

It was a really weird combination of feelings. On one hand, there was
an incredible sense of relief—we could pay our suppliers, we could
start catching up on our rent. We could honor the obligations we had
undertaken. I wasn’t going to have to shut down the store when the
lease ended in February of 2021. Because I was already thinking
about—what could we do with the stuff?

You mean the books. OMG, that sucks!

You know, when you contemplate shutting a business down, you have to
start thinking about that stuff. You can’t just lock the door and
walk away. And then we put the word out in a small way, and we had
some really generous contributions from the very small number of
emails I had sent out. On the other hand, suddenly there was all this
money around. Not to be too blunt about it, but I was like, “Oh God,
now I really can’t fuck this up.” You know, people have shown
incredible faith, and I have to honor that.

How has your customer changed?

The shift has been really noticeable—prior to the pandemic, and for
decades, we got about 70 percent of our revenue from food
professionals. From restaurant people, from caterers, and so forth.
And those people, of course, have been hurt really badly. Worse than
we are. So there’s been a big shift to a lot more home-based books
for us. It’s not like the professionals have completely gone away;
we can do really nicely with professionally oriented books, like with
the new Thomas Keller book. But we are definitely selling a higher
percentage of books to the home cooks. What I just can’t answer is
whether these are people who were previously buying from Amazon or
Barnes & Noble who’ve decided to come to us, or whether they’re
people who have just sort of embarked upon a new phase of their
kitchen work. I was talking to one of my colleagues today about this,
and she said, it’s her feeling that people are a lot more willing to
tackle slightly more ambitious books—books that involve more time in
the kitchen.

Quick and easy.

Right, dinner in 20 minutes isn’t quite as crucial.

I feel that as well from our readership on TASTE, and I feel that from
the folks I talk to in the cookbook publishing industry. I feel home
is central—restaurants obviously are not viable marketing tools
right now for books, but it seems like project cooking has become
popular. And, really, we all are cooking so much more, and this is
here to stay.

There are people who were used to dining out pretty often—you go out
one night for Italian, next night you go out for Thai, and two nights
later, you’re in an Indian restaurant—and they’re used to a lot
of variety. And unless they’re burning up the Seamless app on their
phone, they’re going to have to be doing a lot more of that at home,
so they’re building out their library so that they have a greater
range of choices.

I one-hundred-percent agree, and I think of it especially with a
younger audience. Like an affluent millennial living in a
city—we’re seeing a shift from, obviously, this voracious
restaurant appetite, to realizing that cooking is not hard—or not as
hard as they thought. And, also, that they are having fun cooking. And
that cooking is as fun as going to a restaurant.

Yeah, and I think, frankly, if people are just feeding themselves, as
opposed to feeling like they have to have a bunch of friends over,
which a lot of people aren’t doing right now, it takes a lot of the
pressure to perform off. They don’t have to nail it the first time.
And so they’re more willing to experiment. If somebody wants to do
nothing but all-American comfort food, they have tons of choices, but
if they want to stick their foot into a deeper part of the pool, or at
least one they’re not as familiar with, they try it, and you know .
. . maybe they love it, and maybe they think to themselves, I’m not
going to complain so much about that restaurant anymore. But I think
if you’re not having to produce glorious food for a party, or every
moment doesn’t have to be Instagrammable, then yeah, you’ll take
some risks.

And you’ll also get better, too, because if you start actually
cooking four to five times a week, you’d imagine that the feedback
loop would offer a positive response, right?

And when you begin to understand your own strengths, books become more
accessible to you, because you can read a recipe and understand the
recipe and where it might be asking you to do more work than one line
says. And you can end up being less frustrated about it, because you
can go in with your eyes wide open.

I asked you this question when I had you on the TASTE Podcast in 2018,
and I want to ask you again two years later: What’s a surprising
genre that you feel like is really taking off in your store? I know
bread books obviously have done well, but what else?

I think baking in general has risen, along with bread. That’s been
our impression. I mean, this is a funny, funky season, with like eight
or nine pie books out of nowhere. If I had been publishing one of
those books, I might have said, “Oh, we could wait a little bit.”
But yeah, there are some really serious contenders in that cluster, so
it’s going to be interesting to see what ends up being the popular
favorite.

I would say, in general, people are more willing to pursue national
and regional cuisines across the board. It’s not like there’s one
part of the world that people are particularly receptive to. But I
think it is part of that sense of “Hey, I’ve got traditional home
cooking down,” whether it’s the classic all-American or another
national cuisine that you might have grown up with because of where
your parents were from. People feel comfortable with that stuff, so
they’re looking for things that take them outside their comfort
zone. And we’ve seen a lot of books succeed this year because they
also have a lot of cultural material. I think people are hungry for a
book that informs them as much as it gives them recipes.

Of course, a hundred percent.

And that may be just our customer base, but it extends to everything
from In Bibi’s Kitchen, a book by Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen, to
a book that Interlink did called Parwana, about Afghan food, which is
incredibly informative about so many aspects about Afghan culture, as
this woman whose family owns an Afghan restaurant in Australia is
telling her family story.

When we spoke two years ago, you mentioned Ethiopia, and how there was
a real need for more Ethiopian cookbooks, and like magic, there have
been a couple really good ones released. Are there other regions that
you’ve been happy to see covered?

I think interest is growing strongly for the Philippines. And I think
there’s a heck of a lot more to be said there. It’s so diverse and
has so many overlapping ethnic groups and cultures and languages and
climates. And also, frankly, we’re getting a lot of interest in
Indonesia and Malaysia, for which representation is a lot lighter—at
least from mainstream publishing houses. We’re continuing to have to
sort of stretch ourselves to find things for people who want to learn
about that part of the world.

Coconut & Sambal. That’s a really cool book. Anna just interviewed
the author, Lara Lee.

Yes! That’s a cool book, but there’s some very dynamic publishing
happening in that part of the world, too, so we’re bringing stuff in
directly. Because it’s just a way to be able to offer our customers
something that they’re not seeing anywhere else.

Are there any other books you want to see made?

I think Central America is an area that people are always asking
about; they’ve been asking about it for a long time, and it sort of
vanishes in between, say, southern Mexico and Peru, and there’s not
a lot of coverage in English. A little bit for Colombia, a little bit
for Ecuador, but even that is hard to find. And anything that sort of
says, “Hey, this is Costa Rica, this is Nicaragua,” there’s not
much there. It’s an area that a lot of people from the United States
have been traveling to—they eat well, they come back, they’re
interested, and there’s nothing to offer them. And I think that that
could be a rewarding place to engage. My colleague who is a former
pastry chef said, “Why aren’t there any pastry chef memoirs?”
And it’s a question that pastry chefs ask us when they come here.
“Don’t we have anything by so-and-so?”

Dalia Jurgensen wrote one over a decade ago, and it’s great, but
that’s such a good point.

It is a different game. And I’m sure that for women pastry chefs and
men pastry chefs, it’s also two different sides of the coin. I think
that there’s a lot of coverage for Southeast Asia that could still
become a lot richer. You can try to find yourself five books on
Malaysia in English, and you’re going to be struggling.

Do you keep in contact with Celia [Sack] at Omnivore Books in San
Francisco, the Now Serving team in Los Angeles, and other cookbook
store owners? Do you guys have a sort of camaraderie or competition?

We have, I think, a pretty friendly relationship, and we trade
information around. The store in Montreal [Appetite for Books] wrote
me last week; they were having real trouble getting a book that we’d
been carrying for a while, so I gave them a contact email that they
didn’t have. The fact that these really strong stores exist in other
parts of the country is a good thing. We’re better off with a
culture in which people sort of know that there are these specialty
stores with different taste and demand for books.

Oh, yeah. The cookbook buyer—it’s not a monoculture at all.

No, no. And we’ve been incredibly reminded of that, as we’ve seen
a lot more business from all over the country. And we’re still on
the phone all the time, answering people’s questions, helping them
choose a particular book. And the thing that works really nicely for
that person who lives in Williamsburg is not necessarily going to be
the best thing for somebody who’s in suburban Birmingham.

We asked Matt to name some of his favorite recent releases from a busy
fall season:

In Bibi’s Kitchen by Hawa Hassan with Julia Turshen

This sweeping survey of African cooking along the Indian Ocean does it
right. It treats the eight countries, their food, and their heritage
as distinct regions. Using the vivid stories of cooks, it creates rich
and fascinating portraits of home cooking steeped in history and
flavor. 

Parwana by Durkhanai Ayubi

Afghan food has had so little coverage in English, and this book makes
it clear how much we’ve all been missing out. The author, whose
family fled Afghanistan and who now runs a restaurant in Australia,
weaves a touching personal story into a larger cultural one, built
around brightly flavored and hearty food.

The Flavor Equation by Nik Sharma

If you experiment in the kitchen, you need this book. Sharma, a gifted
cook and trained biologist, explains how flavor is created, perceived,
and manipulated, as he presents his own imaginative recipes as
demonstrations. Brilliant and eye-opening, it will jolt you out of any
culinary rut. 

Baking at the 20th Century Café by Michelle Polzine

Polzine conjures the magic of Eastern European pastry shops with the
occasional California gloss in this ambitious book. It’s an absolute
treat for bakers who like to immerse themselves in serious projects to
create gorgeous, sophisticated showstoppers.

Good Drinks by Julia Bainbridge

Whatever your reason for not drinking alcohol, Julia Bainbridge has
your back. Working with some of the country’s most creative beverage
pros, she offers up complex, beautiful, boozeless drinks that exude
good taste and sophistication. No

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