INTRODUCTION by Chris Cechin-De la Rosa

One late night at the end of summer, Mark Ladner and I arranged to meet at a Japanese bar in the Chelsea area of New York City. He’d just finished a dinner shift at Del Posto, where he is executive chef and Brooks Headley’s boss. When Ladner arrived, the bartender knowingly placed a big yellow draft beer in front of him with a smile.

Ladner is charming and calm, tall, with short hair and big perfect teeth. He speaks just softly enough for you to realize that you talk too loudly. His tone is measured and serious, but he is darkly comedic. If Ladner is less than a full-blown celebrity, it is by his own design. He has the bearing of a cook from some other time.

Del Posto is a modern relic, too: huge, ornate, massively expensive. As an Italian restaurant, it stands alone in its fine-dining aspirations. The food is astounding but comforting, quietly complex but honest, committed to flavor above all else, including ego. Philosophically, Del Posto speaks to Brooks.

Ladner and I ordered food and a bottle of sake and I asked him how Brooks, then a nobody on the Manhattan food scene, landed the pastry chef job at Del Posto, the crown jewel of the vast Mario Batali and Bastianich family empire.

“Brooks wrote me a letter that was very compelling,” he said.

In 2008, Brooks sent Ladner a 570-word e-mail at 3 o’clock on a Saturday morning asking for a shot at the job. He was drunk, but the note was surprisingly lucid. It was at least a little inappropriate, but it was enough to land an interview and afterward a chance to present a tasting. Things went well. Ladner invited Brooks back for a private dinner, where he offered Brooks the job.

“I wore a tie under a sweater and I was terrified,” Brooks once told me. “Ladner gave me a bunch of books. I don’t remember saying anything except OK.” They had a lot to drink because there was a lot for Ladner to cover.

“When you work closely with someone in a certain way, you have to know their guts at least a little,” Ladner said, like he and Brooks were starting a band. The bet was that Brooks fit the psychological profile. The recipes would come.

“His cooking today is nothing like it was back then,” he said.

Between then and now is what is in this book, mostly. The majority of the recipes belong to Brooks. There are several he has inherited, cribbed, or stolen outright. A handful belong to people who work for him and there’s one on loan from Ladner. Many of them appear seasonally in one form or another on the Del Posto menu.

There is the celebrated Celery Sorbet, acidic and bright, and the magically cryptic Eggplant and Chocolate. There are eleven gelato recipes—from strawberry to olive oil to oatmeal—and a lot of vegetables used in ways few people are accustomed to. There is the exemplary Butterscotch Mascarpone Semifreddo that evolved out of his inability to steal one of chef Nancy Silverton’s trademark desserts. The Bastoncino from the Del Posto dessert box is here, as are several subtle but striking sorbets. Polenta is everywhere. There’s also a Pasta Frolla, a cheesy Italian s’more, and the constant threat that Brooks is going to have you soak something in verjus. It is the most unintentionally contrary dessert book you own, which will aggravate Brooks to hear. He isn’t out to trick anyone and he isn’t hiding anything. His middle name is Oliver.

There is nonetheless something masochistically methodical in getting at dishes as simple as Brooks’s. His recipes are a hybrid of childhood ephemera, lessons from time spent cooking with underpaid and overtalented immigrants in DC, and mangled reworkings of the American pastry masters. It is baffling how many screw-ups land on the Del Posto menu. With Brooks, it’s all a series of in-jokes, and maybe you never laugh. But by the time the plate is placed in front of you, it contains the most explosively flavored, most biographically layered plum you’ve ever eaten.

Condensed, the biography is simple. Brooks was born in 1972 in Towson, Maryland, where he was raised by his mom. His family’s roots are in the Calabria region of Italy and like with many Italian American families, kitchen work came naturally. He started playing drums in punk bands as a teenager and, along with much of the scene back then, became vegetarian. He started college, dropped out, played in more bands and toured, returned to school, learned how to make desserts, and then won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2013. It is a story that is as endearing to some as it is infuriating to others. In a lot of ways, the schizophrenic career arc is the allure of the food.

Brooks spent what would have been his cooking school years on tour playing drums in obscure but beloved punk bands instead: Born Against, Universal Order of Armageddon, Wrangler Brutes, Skull Kontrol. These names mean a lot to people who may never—or would never—step foot in Del Posto. As bands, they have some things in common musically, but more important, they share the unique ideology of an era from the early 1990s to early 2000s punk rock: independent but communal, honest but sarcastic, earnest but often deeply self-conscious. Brooks eventually got a degree in literature from the University of Maryland, but he mentions school once in this book—to explain that he dropped out to join Born Against, then his favorite band.

There are annoying things to be said right here about the artistic connection between playing the drums and pastry cheffing. Each is exacting and rhythmic and you use two hands and both legs. Both require commitment and focus and are physically exhausting. True, all of it. But with Brooks it’s simpler: They are service jobs, largely selfless. You are as likely to see Brooks play a complicated drum solo as you are to visit his personalized dessert truck—neither will ever happen. Brooks is collaborative at the core.

“At Del Posto, Brooks instantly made a conscious effort to assimilate,” Ladner told me. It’s hard to imagine it any other way. The Del Posto kitchen—sprawling, impeccable, systematic, industrial—comes across as maybe the most deferential place in Manhattan.

“And it continues today,” Ladner said. “When Brooks hires a new cook, he brings them quietly over to watch the savory side of the kitchen and explains things to them: ‘The reason we do this is because these guys do that.’ It’s so respectful. That thing just doesn’t happen in a professional kitchen.”

I asked if what Brooks does was off-putting at first.

“I didn’t know how to handle it,” Ladner explained. “It’s just so unusual. But the more he did that the more I reciprocated and it allowed us to become a seamless expression. Stylistically, we started to create in the same ways.”

It makes sense that this book is also collaborative. In a turn that is both ego free and egocentric, Brooks sought out people and ideas to fill pages in ways he couldn’t. Contributing writers include three punk icons: engineer and musician Steve Albini, author and musician Ian Svenonius, and novelist and vocalist Sam McPheeters. He commissioned an essay on chocolate from Brad Kintzer, the esteemed head chocolatier at TCHO, and an explication of olive oil from Nicholas Coleman, probably the nation’s leading olive oil expert. Essayist Sloane Crosley delivered a personal story about taste buds, food writer and musician Robert Sietsema wrote about where punks ate in New York City in the eighties, and artist Cali Thornhill-DeWitt recounted the horrors of Del Posto’s neighborhood before it was recast as a fashionable destination for people with a lot of money. Journalist Katie Parla underscores the macabre side of Italian pastry. In a recurring series cribbed from a Born Against flier from the early nineties called Profile in Courage, Brooks collects portraits of seven people he admires, mostly chefs plus one legendary punk singer, in a way that both sublimates and illuminates his own story.

Taken together, the book is Brooks in full: serious but not, studied but accidental, respectful but ridiculous, approachable yet quietly insular. The book is self-effacing and open and honest. It is slapstick but also massively sincere. There are references you’ll latch on to immediately and others you won’t get even after an hour of research. In ways, it’s novelistic—it doesn’t require that you get every allusion. (Although, if you don’t know what Joy Division is, you might be in the wrong place.) As with Brooks’s food, the book is at once entirely about the thing and entirely not about the thing.

It’s been more than five years now that Ladner and Brooks have worked together, and in that time Del Posto has earned four stars from The New York Times—tenuous but deserved praise that both Ladner and Brooks know may well be stripped by the time you read this. In the restaurant review, Brooks was given an uncommon amount of coverage for a pastry chef—a testament to Ladner’s idea of a “seamless expression.”

When Ladner and I finished the sake, it was somewhere approaching 1 a.m. He fielded a message from Brooks, just finishing his dinner shift, and we made plans to meet him for a beer. Before we left, I asked Ladner if there was anything else I should know about Brooks.

“It’s not about us,” he said softly. “You want to express yourself as a chef, but you want your food and your plate to speak in ways that express soul. It’s not that you especially want to show how creative you are, but that you have a soul. Brooks does that exceptionally well. It’s disarming.”

I looked at him, and maybe he felt as if I didn’t believe him.

“He’s managed a way to express himself,” he said. “But it’s not exactly punk.”

He smiled.

“Maybe it is, though.”

Ladner.