Our Cookbook of the Week: 'Brown Sugar Kitchen'

Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week: Brown Sugar Kitchen: New-Style, Down-Home Recipes from Sweet West Oakland (Chronicle Books)

The Team: Brown Sugar Kitchen and B-Side BBQ executive chef and owner Tanya Holland, food writer Jan Newberry, and photographer Jody Horton.

The Restaurant: Brown Sugar Kitchen, which opened in 2008 in gritty West Oakland, California. (Diners will wait in line for nearly two hours if at the end of it they find this pot of gold: buttermilk fried chicken and cornmeal waffles.)

The Cuisine: Soul food, baby. Though she grew up in New York, Holland’s roots are in the American South; her mother is from Louisiana and her father, Virginia. Beyond the renowned chicken and waffles, you’ll find shrimp and grits, gumbo, and pulled pork on the menu—and in the book.

Who Should Buy It: Lovers of salt, sweets, the South, and soul.

Who Shouldn’t: Anyone on a juice cleanse.

Must-Make Recipes: Cornmeal Waffles with Apple Cider Syrup, Buttermilk Fried Chicken, Creole Gazpacho, Dirty Rice, Sweet Potato Scones with Brown Sugar Icing, Westside Julep.

Noteworthy: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, who lives in Berkeley, wrote the book’s foreword. “I believe that I could be hauled back from the gates of the Underworld by the prospect of a bowl of Tanya’s shrimp and grits,” he writes.