Bring on the beignets.

Pastry chef and New Orleans native David Guas, who until recently was the face behind the desserts at the Passion Food Group restaurants (DC Coast, TenPenh, Acadiana, Ceiba, Passionfish), just released his first cookbook, DamGood Sweet. Many of the recipes come with passages about the traditions—both personal and historical—that are associated with them. (Guas remembers eating powdered-sugar-covered beignets at Café du Monde as a reward for good church behavior.) Currently, Guas is working on finding a location for Bayou Bakery, which will feature many of the pastries in his cookbook. In between scouting spaces, he sat down with us to chat about what he’s making on Thanksgiving and the recipe he craves the most.

Judith Jones is the editor behind many a kitchen bible. Photograph by Christopher Hersheimer.

Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is just hitting the top of the New York Times bestseller list this week. And though Julie & Julia author Julie Powell (not to mention Meryl Streep) is getting much of the credit, the woman responsible for putting it on bookshelves in the first place is Knopf editor Judith Jones. She took a chance on the book after it had been rejected from another publisher as out of sync with the can-opening times, and over the next five decades she went on to polish the work of plenty more culinary all-stars, including Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis, and Jeffrey Steingarten. On October 21, Jones will be in town to talk about her own book, The Pleasures of Cooking for One.

She’s inaugurating Stir Food Group and Hooks Books Events’ new Food for Thoughts author series at Zola Wine + Kitchen (505 Ninth St., NW; 202-654-2855). The event, which runs from 6 to 8, will include a discussion with Jones and a cooking demo. The $75 ticket price includes a copy of her book, a round of appetizers made from its recipes, and two glasses of wine. And of course, the chance to ask the funny, frank Jones about her adventures with Child. Oh, how we’d have loved to see Judith & Julia play out on the big screen.
 

Food writer Monica Bhide has lived around the world, and her new cookbook, Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen (Simon & Schuster, $25), gives readers a peek into her travel diary. Born in New Delhi, Bhide grew up in the Middle East before settling in Northern Virginia. While her childhood memories are scented with the perfume of cardamom and the tang of tamarind, these recipes reflect the needs of a modern cook who’s usually crunched for time.

The book calls itself “inspired Indian,” and indeed many dishes have a subcontinental bent, such as the appetizer section’s delicious peanut tikkis. Tikki means “patty” in Hindi, and Bhide’s pan-fried, bite-size disks of smooth mashed potato are heightened by the sweetness of corn and delicate crunch of crushed peanuts. Drizzled with sweet-and-sour (and store-bought) tamarind chutney, they’re the perfect cocktail snack.
 

The Washington Post’s Tom Sietsema confirmed rumors we’ve been hearing for awhile: Sushi whiz Kaz Okochi, who owns Kaz Sushi Bistro in downtown DC, and Denver-based restaurateur Richard Sandoval, whose empire includes DC’s Zengo and McLean’s Sandia, are coming together to create Masa 14. The Latin/Asian fusion restaurant will occupy 5,000 square feet north of Logan Circle, and the menu will include small plates and specialty cocktails. Latif Guler, owner of Jack’s in DC’s Dupont Circle, will also hold a stake in the venture.

Sietsema also reports that Pesce owner Regine Palladin will move her Dupont Circle fish restaurant down the street to the vacated Montsouris space, where she’ll gain 40 extra seats—she only has 35 now—plus a bar and a bigger kitchen. Palladin will turn the former Pesce into Confit, a small-plates restaurant (concept sound familiar?), which she hopes to open in September. For this newest project, she’s bringing David Craig, who shuttered his eponymous restaurant in Bethesda last year.

Monica Bhide learned to cook from her Indian parents and grandmothers while growing up in Bahrain. This month, the Northern Virginia writer releases her third Indian cookbook, Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen. In it, she takes an innovative approach to a cuisine often thought of as laborious and inaccessible.

Bhide relies on traditional Indian flavors to create 123 time-efficient recipes—everything from a guava bellini to a paneer-and-fig pizza to saffron-cardamom macaroons. She sat down to answer questions about Washington’s Indian-food scene.

For avid foodies, the recent release of celebrated chef Thomas Keller’s book Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide is as exciting as the latest iPhone is for tech nerds. So when the American Institute of Wine and Food announced that Keller, owner of the French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley and Per Se in New York, would be coming to DC’s Mandarin Oriental hotel to talk about the cookbook, industry professionals elbowed each other out of the way to get one of the hundred $95 tickets.

Who hasn’t dreamed of leaving everything behind and moving to Paris? For Patricia and Walter Wells, that dream became a reality when they packed up their lives in New York and moved to the City of Light more than 25 years ago. As the young couple negotiated their way through the initial loneliness, figured out a foreign language, and learned the Kafkaesque rules of French etiquette, they fell in love with the country and their temporary stint turned permanent. We’ve Always Had Paris . . . and Provence (HarperCollins, $26.95) is their joint account of their life together in France, an adventure enhanced by friends, engaging work, and above all, food.

In the 1970s, Wells wrote about food for The Washingtonian. She went on to become food critic for the International Herald Tribune and author of The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris as well as several bestselling cookbooks, eating her way across France in the process. These meals form the backbone of this meandering memoir as she interviews brooding chefs and travels to restaurants both famous and infamous in search of great food. In alternating chapters, her husband, Walter—who retired as executive editor of the International Herald Tribune in 2005—adds his witty and perceptive observations about les Français and life as an expat. Though a “scrapbook” of reminiscences may sound like a recipe for pretension, the Wellses have a gentle, self-deprecating tone that prevents the book from lapsing into self-indulgence.