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The only website dedicated to the hottest romance novels. A list of books to keep you up at night
The Books Behind the Greatest Culinary Minds.
At Best Chef Books, we’ve created the definitive collection of books written by the culinary world’s most influential voices. From memoirs that take you behind the kitchen door to technical masterpieces that revolutionized cooking, our carefully curated selection represents the very best in chef literature.
Whether you’re a professional seeking inspiration, a home cook looking to elevate your skills, or simply fascinated by the culinary world’s inner workings, you’ll find authentic stories of triumph, struggle, and gastronomic discovery that speak to the heart of what makes food such a powerful medium.
#1 – Best Romance Novels
“It Ends with Us”
When Love Demands Impossible Choices
by Colleen Hoover
Hoover’s phenomenon doesn’t seduce with cheap thrills but with emotional authenticity that makes its intimate moments devastatingly powerful. Lily Bloom’s relationship with neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid unfolds with intoxicating chemistry—their elevator encounters and rooftop confessions creating a connection that feels both inevitable and dangerously intense. But what separates this from standard romance fare is how Hoover weaves past and present together, revealing Lily’s childhood witnessing her father’s abuse alongside her blooming relationship with Ryle. When red flags appear in her new romance, Lily’s reckoning with generational trauma creates stakes far beyond typical relationship drama. The novel’s most intimate scenes work because they’re grounded in complex emotional reality—moments of passionate connection complicated by vulnerability, fear, and eventually heartbreaking clarity. This isn’t just a story about finding love but about finding the courage to break cycles, even when your heart protests every step of the way.
#2 – Best Romance Novels
“The Love Hypothesis”
Scientific Method Meets Smoldering Tension
by Ali Hazelwood
Hazelwood’s academic romance cleverly disguises scorching chemistry behind lab coats and fake dating tropes. When biology PhD candidate Olive Smith impulsively kisses Stanford’s most notoriously demanding professor to convince her best friend she’s dating, she inadvertently creates the perfect experiment in attraction. Adam Carlsen—brilliant, intimidating, and unexpectedly willing to maintain her ruse—becomes both variable and constant in Olive’s carefully controlled life. The novel’s genius lies in its slow-burning tension; seemingly clinical interactions in university hallways crackle with subtext while maintaining the professional boundaries necessary in academia. When these boundaries eventually dissolve in a hotel room scene that readers reverently refer to as “Chapter 16,” the payoff feels earned through pages of measured restraint and intellectual sparring. Beyond its steam factor, the novel offers refreshing perspective on women in STEM, academic politics, and the particular vulnerabilities of betting your heart when your career already demands everything you have.
#3 – Best Romance Novels
“People We Meet on Vacation”
Twelve Years of Summer Chemistry
by Emily Henry
Henry crafts a friends-to-lovers journey that aches with longing across a decade of almost-moments and might-have-beens. Polar opposites Poppy and Alex have shared exactly one week of vacation each year since college—eleven summers of inside jokes, vulnerability, and carefully maintained boundaries. Until the summer they ruined everything. What makes this romance exceptional is Henry’s mastery of tension—building years of unacknowledged desire through fleeting touches in shared hotel rooms, meaningful glances across restaurant tables, and the particular intimacy of knowing someone’s quirks and fears completely. When physical barriers finally collapse in a rain-soaked Croatian apartment, the scene works because readers have experienced twelve years of emotional foreplay alongside the characters. Henry’s writing transforms seemingly ordinary vacation moments—sharing street food, arguing over itineraries, falling asleep to the sound of each other’s breathing—into an extended seduction more potent than explicit encounters because they’re grounded in authentic connection that makes the eventual physical expression feel both inevitable and earned.
#4 – Best Romance Novels
“Fourth Wing”
Danger and Desire Take Flight
by Rebecca Yarros
Yarros’ fantasy romance soars on dragon wings into territory where danger and desire become indistinguishable. Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail enters Basgiath War College to become a dragon rider, despite her physically fragile body better suited to life as a scribe. Surrounded by cadets who view her as easy prey and facing instructors determined to break her, Violet finds her most complicated challenge in Xaden Riorson—a ruthless commander with rebellion in his blood and recognition in his eyes. What distinguishes this romance from others in the fantasy genre is Yarros’ ability to make consent and power dynamics central to the developing relationship. Despite brutal training scenarios and political machinations that literally draw blood, the most dangerous territory becomes the vulnerability between two people from opposing factions. Their clandestine encounters in shadowed corners of the college carry the dual thrill of physical discovery and mutual risk—each touch potentially leading to either ecstasy or exposure. The novel’s integration of life-or-death stakes with intimate moments creates a unique alchemy where surviving together becomes its own form of seduction.
#5 – Best Romance Novels
“Heat”
An Obsessive Journey Into Culinary Madness
by Bill Buford
Buford didn’t just write about kitchen life—he threw himself into its inferno with reckless abandon, transforming from comfortable New Yorker editor to kitchen slave in Mario Batali’s three-star restaurant Babbo. His narrative unfolds like a fever dream of kitchen masochism, chronicling his haphazard apprenticeship where he endures savage mockery, horrific burns, and the peculiar joy of achieving competence in the controlled chaos of professional cooking. Unlike chef memoirs that follow career trajectories, Buford’s obsessive curiosity drives him beyond restaurant kitchens to the Italian countryside, where he apprentices with a Tuscan butcher who dismembers pigs with Renaissance precision and studies with pasta artisans who guard centuries-old techniques. Throughout, Buford maintains the perspective of a perpetual outsider granted temporary access to closed culinary worlds, documenting their rituals and excesses with anthropological detail and self-deprecating humor. The result is less a story about cooking than an exploration of how culinary obsession can consume one’s identity—sometimes literally drawing blood.
#6 – Best Romance Novels
“The Devil in the Kitchen”
The Raw Truth Behind the Kitchen Door
by Marco Pierre White
Where White’s earlier “White Heat” showcased his cuisine, this raw autobiography exposes the volcanic temperament behind the dishes. Written after his retirement from cooking, White speaks with the unfiltered honesty of someone with nothing left to prove, chronicling his journey from working-class Leeds to becoming the youngest chef to earn three Michelin stars. The memoir seethes with barely contained fury—at the system that initially excluded him, at mentors who betrayed him, at rivals who copied him, and often at himself. White’s accounts of throwing customers out of his restaurant, reducing Gordon Ramsay to tears, and returning a critic’s credit card cut into pieces would be merely shocking if not balanced by vulnerable moments revealing the emotional damage driving his infamous rage. His description of cooking as “a way of getting away from the unhappiness of my life” transforms what could be career braggadocio into something far more poignant. This complex portrait reveals a man whose pursuit of perfection was ultimately a search for the approval of a mother who died when he was six.
#7 – Best Romance Novels
“32 Yolks”
From Broken Childhood to Culinary Excellence
by Eric Ripert
Ripert’s memoir begins not with culinary triumph but profound loss. His parents’ divorce and his father’s death, events that shaped the sensitive, perfectionistic chef he would become. His prose carries meditative restraint, whether describing childhood meals at his grandmother’s table or the brutal apprenticeship under the legendary Joël Robuchon, where excellence came at psychological cost. Unlike many chef memoirs that glamorize kitchen abuse, Ripert examines how his own trauma made him particularly vulnerable to Robuchon’s manipulation—and eventually led him to create a different kitchen culture at Le Bernardin. The title’s reference to the 32 yolks he was forced to tediously prepare daily becomes a metaphor for the repetition required for mastery and the psychological price of perfection. What distinguishes this narrative is Ripert’s willingness to explore his spiritual journey alongside his culinary one, offering rare glimpses into how Buddhist practice eventually helped him reconcile his drive for perfection with compassion for himself and others.
