A scaled-back Book and the Cook

The Book and the Cook is back. Barely.

The promotional pairing of local restaurants with national cookbook authors will be reprised this month for its 23d consecutive year.

Restructured. Reduced. Replanted from springtime in a harvest edition, Oct. 22 through 28, that its longtime organizer, Judy Faye, hopes will take root.

By last count, 16 authors - including Jonathan Waxman, Joan Nathan, David Rosengarten and Peter Reinhart - are to appear with their cookbooks for 15 dinners at area restaurants. A few more are being discussed, and there are a few side events, but it almost surely will remain the smallest program in Book and the Cook history.

By contrast, even the first edition had 26 dinners over three days. At its height in 1999, 86 authors were on hand for nearly 100 events. For the last several years, the event had drawn about 70 authors.

This year's event will host no food showcase, no preview gala, no beer tasting with a cast of thousands.

A confluence of reasons brought the Book and the Cook to this October passage, not the least of which was the loss of its primary sponsor, KitchenAid, and the closing of the venue set to host the public food expo last spring.

"We wanted to make the event more attractive to authors with fall cookbook releases, timed for the pre-holiday push," said Faye, putting the best face on last March's cancellation and the October rescheduling.

But she readily acknowledges the chief goal in its 23d year is to survive, to preserve its continuity and make it to 2009 and a (hopefully) renewed, restored and respected 25th anniversary with reenergized participation from a restaurant community that has grown uninterested in the event.

Though sharply downsized, the program has taken a high-profile, controversial tack by featuring a hot-button food - foie gras - for its lead dinner at London Grill. Guest author Michael Ginor (Foie Gras: A Passion), co-owner and president of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, one of the world's largest producers of foie gras, will host a dinner featuring the silky rich duck liver that has drawn animal-rights protests over the last several months.

When the Book and the Cook began in the spring of 1985, its mission was to boost local hotel business and jack up the city's image as a tourist destination by promoting its restaurant renaissance.

But the city's continued success filling hotels with conventions and tourists also diminished the food event. It became harder to book venues for the preview gala and the food expo, added in 1990.

After holding the showcase for several years in the suburbs and drawing more than 10,000 guests a year, Book and the Cook lost not only that space (the Fort Washington Expo Center closed last summer), but also, with less notice, lost its major sponsor.

The event's overall success during it 23 years - as the first and longest-running event of its kind in the nation - also contributed to its decline: It spawned competition from copycat food events and festivals in other cities, plus author-hosted restaurant dinners year-round across the country. The Book and the Cook lost its edge as a way of promoting an author's or chef's cookbook.

With the proliferation of Food Network programs, food magazines and blogs plugging an unending stream of cookbooks, some question if the Book and the Cook has outlived its reason to exist.

But Faye isn't ready to throw in the towel.

She and her budget-starved staff have volunteered their time to pull off a respectable 23d Book and the Cook close to the original model this year.

The event will be financed by restaurants, with fees unchanged in 23 years - $1,500 per restaurant ($500 to cover marketing, promotion, publicity and transportation for authors, and a $1,000 honorarium for the author to defray expenses). A city grant, which had been given in the past, has yet to be awarded.

"The good news is that we are already talking to potential sponsors for 2008 and forward," Faye said. But for this year, it's the restaurants that are fueling the program.