Thomas Straker turns recipes up to 11 in his debut cookbook 

Thomas Straker may have been in and out of public favour, but there’s no denying he knows his food. He came to fame through social media and his series on creating different flavours of butter before opening his first restaurant, Straker’s, in 2022. Recently said restaurant suffered a fire in its kitchen, and Straker had the bright idea to stay open and serve a selection of cold crudos and carpaccios to keep the business going.

Some cookbooks are written for home cooks, some for chefs – Straker’s debut cookbook straddles the two with simple (but not by any means basic) recipes, and French bistro-levels of buttery richness. As Straker himself says: “sometimes the simplest way is also the best way”.

It’s called Food You Want To Eat, and though this might be a brazen claim, one look at the bright, luxurious photography will have you in agreement. The chocolate mousse looks so indulgent that the photographer couldn’t help but steal a spoonful, while the burnt cooking residue from the whole lobster with burnt chilli butter has you wanting to take to it with a crusty roll. It’s like the chef has been caught mid-dinner party and invited his reader to join.

There’s no holding back in any of the dishes – the pasta dough he uses for his butternut squash agnolotti and beef short rib ravioli is intensely orange, as he uses a ratio of five parts egg yolk to one part white to bind it together. His meatballs combine minced veal, pork and beef for maximum juiciness and flavour.

The recipes are wide-ranging enough to make for a staple cookbook to have on your shelf, though for the avid collector, there may be some commonality. Straker mixes his more original recipes with his versions of classics, such as chicken Caesar salad, monkfish curry and minestrone. There are restaurant-quality instructions for making mashed potatoes, flatbread and basil pesto – meaning you don’t have to leave the confines of these pages to compile a meal that keeps things fresh and unprocessed. The most useful element is where he combines key ingredients with punchy additions, such as pork chops with plums, chicken schnitzel with burnt salsa and fennel slaw, and braised radicchio with Parma ham, pear and burrata bruschetta.

Food You Want To Eat truly gets the mouth watering and belly rumbling, with dreams of long lunches and the classiest of pub grub.

Food You Want to Eat by Thomas Straker (Bloomsbury Publishing, £25, Hardback). Photography © Issy Crocker. Cook the cavolo nero rigatoni from the book