THE CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR by Carolyn Dailey
DK Penguin Random House, 2025, $21.99
Carolyn Dailey’s wonderful, over 200 pages, small coffee table book, brings together 10 diverse entrepreneurs, from the ultimate and irrepressible hit-maker of the music industry, Nile Rodgers, to a Serbian fashion designer, Roksanda Ilincic, to Ruthie Rogers, the wondrous restaurateur who created the iconic – a tritely overused word, but accurate here – River Cafe in London.
Carolyn smartly lets her subjects, who all have that stardust God sprinkles so randomly and sparingly, do the talking. Their stories are the stories of business success, and often as not, reference emergence from failure. Nile Rodgers, whose music and the music he’s produced for others has generated over two billion dollars, puts it best when he calls failure his teacher. If you’re smart and brave enough, you do learn from it. It certainly humbles you (said, ahem, from experience).
This is a delightful candy box of great, revealing and personal tales about the art of entrepreneurship. No two stories are the same, for all the common themes, some expected, some perhaps unexpected. And one of the certifiable truths I took from it, and, again, can attest to from experience, is no one knew what they were doing when they started, and many never really completely find out. The book should be a TV series. And it probably will be!
~ Bob Guccione, Jr.
YOUR TABLE IS READY: TALES OF A NEW YORK CITY MAÎTRE D by Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
St Martin’s Press, $21.29
The memoir focuses on New York when wealth and overindulgence reigned, and restaurant access and the tables given signified class level. And the ruler of that was the fairy godfather, the restaurant genie who could make everybody’s wishes come true — Michael Cecchi-Azzolina at the maître d’ stand.
Bookending the story with the 2017 James Beard Awards, the author reveals the love, money, friendships, and high moments (often literal) that decorate the path to a restaurant’s success. He shares gossip-worthy anecdotes, name-drops celebrities he met and outlines jaw-dropping moments with coworkers behind the scenes. He spares no detail — except the ones he confesses in the introduction that he doesn’t remember due to the excessive drugs and alcohol consumed at the time.
Anybody who has worked in a restaurant knows that the job takes over your brain for your shift and you forget your issues. And his comparison of the restaurant industry to theater resonates. Like many, he started working as a server while focusing on his acting career during the day. But he moved up the hospitality ranks and realized the restaurant floor is the stage and the means of connection he craved. No two performances are ever the same…
~ Sofia Goldstein
ODE TO TRAVEL by Patrick Trefz (with Christian Beamish, Jim Denevan, David Kinch)
PowerHouse Books, 39.95
Photographer, writer, chef and apparently enough of a surfer to list that as one of his vocations, Patrick Trefz has crafted a wonderful book from his envy-making travels of riding great waves, having special experiences and collecting “forty regional recipes” along the way, which gives you a sense of how many travels. He lists three co-authors, one a Michelin chef, one an artist and food-events impresario, and the other a surfer, who seem to mostly be his Greek chorus.
Patrick is a fine photographer, let’s start there. The pictures are beautiful and alternate between museum worthy art and snapshots you might take on your phone to remember a meal or a house. The extraordinary thing is they all evoke a sense of place. Duh, you’d say, but actually how often is that really the case? Anyone can photograph a street, but only artists can photograph the soul of a street.
My only criticism — and it’s a compliment — is that the pictures are too small on those pages that are tiles of multiple photos. This is a book made, like the best spreads at a dinner party, for dipping into and enjoying. Life is to be tasted, literally and metaphorically.
~ Bob Guccione, Jr