Fact: Bay Areans are a book-loving bunch. Fact: People here are huge food fans.

So is it any wonder, then, that this neck of the woods has a thriving cookbook club culture?

There are differences in how each group operates, but here’s what they all have in common: A desire to share good food and good books about food.

Omnivore Books on Food owner Celia Sack has a theory about the resurgent interest in breaking out the cookbook collection and making meals at home.

“Every time there are major industrial advances, there is a push-back to older ways that are hands-on, and one way to achieve that is through food,” she notes, citing the Industrial Revolution from which the Arts & Crafts movement was born. “Today we have the Internet and smart phones to make virtual connections but spending time with family and friends making food is an easy way to make an actual connection.”

Sack recently launched a cookbook mail order club. Four times a year members receive a new, signed cookbook selected by Sack from the culinary titles that fill her shop. Begun as a gift-giving idea over the holidays, Sack says her list of sign-ups is running about half-and-half between people treating themselves to the latest from, say Madhur Jaffrey or Amanda Hesser, and those sending a gift to someone else. Membership costs $160 a year and can be customized (vegetarians can skip the meat tomes, for example.)

Each of the five cookbook clubs below has its own flavor. You’ll also find advice from a seasoned cookbook club organizer about how to start your own group.

My Calabria, written by Rosetta Costantino (with Janet Fletcher) and photographs by Sara Remington

Cooks’ Book Club — Berkeley

Three fixtures of Berkeley’s chi chi shopping strip on 4th Street — Books Inc., Cafe Rouge, and The Pasta Shop — have joined forces to create a monthly meet up mixing food, wine, and conversation. The club kicks off this Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Cafe Rouge with Rosetta Costantino’s cookbook My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking From Italy’s Undiscovered South. (Read an earlier BAB post on My Calabria.) Subsequent events will be held on the fourth Tuesday of the month, rotating through the three locations.

Costantino will read and share recipes, including stuffed pizza with chard and dill, salt baked sea bass, and cauliflower salad, all paired with Southern Italian vino. Books will be on sale, dishes and drinks sampled, ingredients made available, and discussion will no doubt follow. The event costs $20; admission prices may vary some for each program, depending on what food and wine is on offer.

Up next for the Cooks’ Book Club: Gordon Edgar, author of Cheesemonger: My Life on the Wedge, on February 22 at The Pasta Shop, followed by dessert diva Alice Medrich, author of the Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy, Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies on March 22 at Cafe Rouge.

Fresh by Susanne Friedberg is the book of choice for February's Food Lit Club at 18 Reasons

18 Reasons Food Lit Club — San Francisco

Heather Knape decided to convene a Food Lit Club at 18 Reasons just over a year ago when someone at her regular book group suggested she might want to pick some non-food books for the group to read. The life-long food and farm lover, who blogs about feeding her family at eating dirt, realized she needed a different club to dish about all things edible.

Members make a three-month commitment to the club, after which you can decide whether you want to continue or choose to give up your coveted spot to a newcomer.

Books can be bought from Omnivore Books (20 percent of profits go to fund the work of the nonprofit food group 18 Reasons) or you can bring your own. The group gathers on the third Sunday of the month from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at 18 Reasons. It’s a B.Y.O. nibbles kind of deal, typically a rotating snack roster or potluck affair.

Each quarter the group reads something old, something new, and something local, so authors can come too. This month the group discussed Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin. February’s pick is Fresh by Susanne Friedberg, followed in March by An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher by Anne Zimmerman, who will put in an appearance. Previous picks include Cheesemonger, The Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms by Nicolette Hahn Niman and Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg.

Knape moderates the meet ups and sends out discussion questions in advance.

Kristine Kidd's book Weeknight Fresh + Fast is the featured cookbook in February at Williams-Sonoma

Williams-Sonoma Cookbook Club — Los Gatos, Monterey, Palo Alto, Pleasanton, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Walnut Creek

The high-end kitchen store Williams-Sonoma’s cookbook club offers cooking classes by in-house chefs showcasing recipes in a cookbook featured each month, often one of their own titles.

The classes cost $75, and include cooking tips and techniques, a three-course tasting menu, and the cookbook. Reservations are required and space is limited; class times vary by store location.

Last month the store featured Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys by Lucinda Scala Quinn, next up is the Williams-Sonoma Weeknight Fresh + Fast by Kristine Kidd, the former food editor of Bon Appetit, followed in March by Williams-Sonoma Good Food to Share by Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan, founder of the popular cooking site The Kitchn.

At 101 Cookbooks Heidi Swanson's library allows food lovers from around the world to connect over cookbooks

101 Cooks books Library — Anywhere and Everywhere

You don’t even have to leave home to connect with other cookbook lovers. Heidi Swanson’s home-grown food blog 101 Cookbooks recently launched 101 Cookbooks Library, where readers can connect in cyberspace with fellow food aficionados to review cookbooks, highlight their favorite dishes, and offer recipe tweaks based on their own kitchen experience.

A couple of standout reviewers have emerged on Swanson’s site, which draws an enthusiastic, healthy cooking crowd with culinary smarts. It’s early days, but Swanson says cookbooks published long ago could experience a revival with a new generation of cooks through her forum, which attracts participants from as far away as Australia and Amsterdam. “I love seeing the interaction between members,” says Swanson. “You see friendships emerging and people helping each other, often from opposite ends of the globe.”

Wine Country chef Cindy Pawlcyn's Big Small Plates was picked by other culinary professionals for discussion by the Napa Cook/Book Club

Cook/Book Club — Napa

Started five years ago by Napa Valley Register food columnist Betty Teller, the Cook/Book Club has a pretty impressive professional pedigree, with just a few civilians in the mix. We’re talking cookbook author Janet Fletcher, pastry chef Annie Baker, chefs, foragers, Slow Food folks, wine guys — even a registered dietician who works with The Biggest Loser TV show. The group meets every two months to dine and dish. Everyone picks a recipe from the featured cookbook to make and during the dinner each person describes what they made, and offer their thoughts on the recipe and the book in general. The conversation flows. One hard and fast rule: No recipe tweaking. Tough for veteran chefs.

Local authors whose books have been featured by group members have even joined the festivities, including Joyce Goldstein (Italian Slow and Savory), Flo Braker (Baking for All Occasions), Joey Altman (Without Reservations), and Cindy Pawlcyn (Big Small Plates). “As the group has evolved –and no one has dropped out — this has become a truly great dinner party with phenomenal food and excellent company, that has its basis as a book club,” explains Teller. “We have our theoretical discussion questions which we largely ignore.”

Teller’s group isn’t taking on any new members. She encourages people to start their own.

Her advice for beginning cookbook club organizers:
• Invite a mix of people who don’t all know each other well to keep things interesting.
• Include singles and marrieds but think long and hard about couples, which can change group dynamics.
• Find people equally interested in cooking, and if you’re going to cook too, with fairly similar culinary skills.
• Seek out folks with similar edible interests — whether omnivores, vegetarians, vegans, gluten-free.
• Consider size: About 15 is a good number, so if people miss a meeting there’s still a critical mass.
• Give it time to grow. It can take a few meetings for things to gel and people to commit to coming.
• Keep track of who hosts, what books are chosen, and create a calendar for the year for planning purposes.

Celia Sack. Photo: Courtesy of Celia Sack

The stock of new, antiquarian and collectible cookbooks at Omnivore Books in Noe Valley is legendary, and the one of a kind store continues to be successful after opening in November 2008. One sweet touch is the blend of books coupled with fresh eggs for sale and occasional free apples from owner Celia Sack. Sack is often on duty at the store, where she offers friendly but knowledgeable advice based on her years as a book collector. Alice Waters cited the store as a culinary favorite in a recent Bay Area Bites interview, and industry and home cooks flock to the store to stock up and attend in-store events ranging from punch contests to edible art and a recent talk that included a Colorado whiskey tasting with Buzzio sausage. Sack also owns a pet store with her partner, Paula Harris, and the two stores have a connecting passageway. The two live in Corona Heights. When she isn't working or testing recipes for her selections for Williams-Sonoma stores nationwide, or upcoming "curated recipe keeper" book with a working title of The Omnivore's Recipe Keeper, Sack says she enjoys the following joints for shopping, eating, and drinking.

Celia Sack and Paula Harris. Photo: Courtesy of Celia Sack

Sack and Harris had their first date fifteen years ago in the Haight at Kate's Kitchen. "We got slap happy, on a sugar high, and rolled into bed together," Sack says, adding confirmation that yes, we can quote her on that last part. The two share what Sack calls "our secret thing" from Mill Valley, which is a guilty pleasure: In-N-Out Burger for double-doubles. They stop on their way to Tomales, where they have a home. "We stop in on a Saturday night, after we are exhausted from work. Eat our double-doubles and watch all the clean scrubbed teenagers" digging into their own fast food fare. Staying in Tomales is a way to rest and recharge on days off, and the eggs that Sack sells in the store are from there.

Petaluma is home to other favorites for the duo. "We always go to Dempsey's. Also, there's a tea place called the Tea Room Café. It's just so wonderful, and I’m going there with my sister soon."

For what she calls a "calm grocery store experience" with a "fantastic liquor selection," Sack heads to Mollie Stone's, in the old Tower Market space in Twin Peaks. "There are three shelves of spectacular bourbon," she says, and that the parking is easy. "They have a parking lot in the back, that no one uses, or seems to know about."

New May Wah on Clement Street is Sack's resource for Asian ingredients, in the Richmond District. "It's a store that has space that is half fresh goods, like fish, meat and vegetables. The other half is full of dried goods, that are awesome."

Down the street on Clement, Sack likes to get "the best pho in the city," at Mai's Vietnamese Restaurant, which tends to not be as crowded (ever) as the nearby Burma Superstar.

After work, Sack and Harris "love to go to Range, and sit at the counter." The cocktail drink of the day is something Sack says she always orders, along with a mix of the restaurant's appetizers. "They change (the apps) a lot, and I prefer to eat any of their appetizers" as a meal, says Sack.

La Ciccia, which is a few blocks away from Omnivore Books, is a go-to spot due to "their pastas, which are all wonderful. The whole fish dish is really nice. They have an amazing Sardinian wine list."

Sack shares a secret for getting a table at the popular Gialina Pizzeria, in Glen Park. "If you call ahead, they will put you on the list." Upon arrival, it's a pizza--the nettles with pancetta is a draw--and "all the pizzas are awesome," adding that owner Sharon Adriana's strengths are her salads and cheesecake. Sack says the salads are so good that "she should do a restaurant just around salads," a concept that could gain traction in the green-friendly Bay Area.

Back at the shop, Omnivore is set to have a busy October, with a schedule that Sacks calls "so insane and great" and definitely worth checking out. Diana Kennedy, Madhur Jaffrey, Rajat Parr & Jordan McKay, Michael Chiarello, Tyler Florence, Dorie Greenspan, Rene Redzepi, are among the highlights.

Today's post is short and sweet, but I do mean sweet.

Two weeks ago, Omnivore Books on Food quietly opened its doors in Noe Valley. When I found out about it from a friend of mine who is much hipper than I am, I nearly wet myself with joy. I have been known to lose myself in used bookstores for hours, but I have never been to one dealing exclusively in cookbooks.

Housed, appropriately enough, in a former butcher shop, Omnivore is the dream child of Celia Sack, an antiquarian book dealer with a special passion for cookbooks. Even her name sounds as though it came straight from a novel. Celia Sack. It is, to me, a name that should be attached to a book store.
Omnivore's fare reaches beyond new, antiquarian, and collectible cookbooks. As its website states, "Omnivore connects the past to the present by offering centuries of knowledge on growing, raising, and cooking food." There are books on animal husbandry, nut growing, even a whole shelf devoted to organic farming-- from the 1940's and 1950's. It's a fascinating browse-- a kind of hog heaven for book lovers.

Among my favorite curiosities on the store were a collection of miniature liqueur bottles once owned by Hal B. Wallis, Oscar-winning producer of a little-known film entitled Casablanca. They were rescued by Sack (a friend of the family) when Wallis' gold-digging last wife was stealing him, well, blind, as his eyesight began to fail.

Omnivore will soon be hosting book-related events. In December, the store will host such guests as Cindy Mushet, author of The Art and Soul of Baking, and Clark Wolf, author of American Cheeses. To find out about more events, visit Omnivore's event calendar online. Or, hell, go into the store and pick one up yourself.

In an era where books are gradually losing ground to the likes of the Internet and Kindle, and in a global economy that is causing people to curtail their expenditures, Omnivore's debut is a brave one. But a necessary one, I think. There is a certain comfort in reading about food, certainly, but that comfort is often served cold when reading about it on a computer screen. It cannot compare to the heft of a good book in one's hands, the smell of its musty pages, or the knowledge that it has been loved and used and read by others. Beyond what's written in its pages, there is a story behind every book. And I think Celia and Omnivore understand that. Perfectly.

Omnivore is located at:

3885a Cesar Chavez Street

San Francisco, CA 94131

Tel: 415-282-4712

omnivorebooks.com