Hawksworth: The Cookbook by David Hawksworth

What’s the USP? Dishes drawn from the 30-year career of one of Canada’s most high-profile chefs and restaurateurs, with stories and anecdotes of kitchen and restaurant life. 

Who’s the author? David Hawksworth is chef propriator of the eponymous Hawksworth restaurant in the Rosewood Hotel Georgia and the more casual Nightingale restaurant and Bel Cafés, all in Vancouver. He is the winner of 2012 and 2013 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Awards Restaurant of the Year and Chef of the Year and for four consecutive years, Best Upscale Dining, as well as enRoute magazine’s top three Best New Restaurants, and Maclean’s magazine Restaurant of the Year. In 2008, he became the youngest chef inductee in to the BC Restaurant Hall of Fame.  In 2013 he launched the Hawksworth Young Chef Scholarship Foundation and has had a culinary partnership with Air Canada since 2015. 

Is it good bedtime reading? The story of Hawksworth’s career is told through a series of memoirs dotted throughout the book. His time in the UK make for particularly entertaining and enlightening reading. When staging at Marco Pierre White’s The Restaurant, Hawksworth was warned never to look at the great chef during service, ‘Look him in the eye, then you’re a target – you’re finished’. As opening chef at Raymond Blanc’s Le Petit Blanc in Oxford, Hawksworth recalls having to cut the door to the meat locker in half and crawl in and out on his hands and knees because it was blocked by a staircase.   

Will I have trouble finding ingredients?  Hawksworth’s contemporary Canadian food might exalt west coast produce like spot prawns, sablefish and sockeye salmon, but they can be easily substituted for more readily available alternatives if you’re based outside of Canada. 

The book includes not only fine dining dishes with ingredients that might be harder to source such as squab for pot-au-feu with parsley dumplings but also recipes from his more casual Nightingale restaurant and Bel Cafés, such as crispy buttermilk fried chicken and clam spaghetti, the ingredients for which are more straightforward to track down. 

What’s the faff factor? It varies hugely from recipe to recipe.  The average home cook is not going to tackle a sophisticated creation like foie gras, artichoke, truffle and madeira jus on a Wednesday night after getting home late from the office. On the other hand, you could knock up a bowl of Blue Hubbard Squash soup in about 45 minutes. Even easier, once you’ve marinated chicken overnight, spicy chicken and green papaya salad would take less than 30 minutes to complete. 

How often will I cook from the book? For the most part, you will need to set aside a decent amount of time to cook many of the recipes in the book. However aside from a few showpiece dishes like mosaic of venison, duck and quail and ‘Symphony of the Sea’ that’s made with prawns, oysters, scallops, halibut and salmon which will probably remain restaurant-only creations, recipes like 48-hour beef short ribs with black pepper jam; salumi pizza; roasted cauliflower with green harissa and sunflower seeds, and dark chocolate chunk cookies will mean the book’s glossy and beautifully designed pages will soon gather the stains of regular kitchen use.   

Killer recipes? In addition to distinctively west coast dishes such as  there is an unmistakably European accent to the recipes in his first cookbook. That’s no surprise, as Hawksworth spent the 1990s working in some of the best UK kitchens of the time including The Square and Marco-era L’Escargot. Dishes include a mosaic of venison, duck and quail taught to Hawksworth by Gary Jones at Le Manoir, and a yellowfin tuna-wrapped crab salad inspired by Bruno Loubet’s whole seabass stuffed with panzanella that was on the menu at Isola when Hawksworth worked there.  Vancouver is a famously cosmopolitan city and Hawksworth reflects that in dishes like spicy chicken and green papaya salad and jungle pork curry.

What will I love? Although aimed at a North American audience, ingredients  are listed with grams and ml measurements as well as cups, making the book perfectly usable for UK readers. 

Should I buy it? In his foreword, Phil Howard says, ‘I know for certain that you will not regret investing in this book – and the knowledge of this chef’. I can only concur.  

Cuisine: Canadian/International 
Suitable for: Confident home cooks/Professional chefs 
Cookbook Review Rating: Five stars

A version of this review first appeared in The Caterer magazine. 

Buy this book
Hawksworth: The Cookbook
£33.99, Appetite By Random House

Cook from this book
48- hour beef short ribs, compressed melon, black pepper jam, green papaya salad by David Hawksworth
Roasted Duck Breast, Xo Sauce, Carolina Gold Rice, Macadamia Purée by David Hawksworth
Caramel Pots De Crème With Whipped Crème Fraîche by David Hawksworth