Extra Sauce: The Good, the Bad, and the Onions - Hardcover

Tangorra, Zahra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593733371 ISBN 13: 9780593733370

Verlag: The Dial Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A raw and raucous memoir from chef and writer Zahra Tangorra about the great meals and great loves of her life, reflecting on family, friendship, grief, and the solace that can be found through food

“Delicious . . . For Tangorra, food is an expression of her wild and mysterious inner world.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A memoir that feeds both body and soul . . . lush, fearless, and tender.”—Ruth Reichl

Extra sauce is how I like my pizza and also how I fall in love. Extra sauce is for sopping, dunking, and licking off your plate. Licking off your fingers. It is a tiny demand for freedom and hedonism. Life has told you this is the amount of joy you get, and you say: That is simply not enough.

At twenty-two years old, Zahra Tangorra was trying on adulthood and attempting to find herself when a harrowing near-death experience stopped her in her tracks. It felt like a twisted version of a second chance. Who am I? she asked herself. What do I love? The answers started coming to her: Stuffed shells and giant meatballs at J&J’s, the Italian red sauce joint of her Long Island childhood. Her mother’s chocolate mousse pie and her father’s sweet and savory pea soup. The people, places, and experiences that made her her, the relationships both loving and fraught—they were all, for better and sometimes worse, inextricably bound up with food.

In this memoir that celebrates both the delicious and the messy in life, Zahra reckons with the adrenaline-filled highs and devastating lows of opening cult-favorite Brooklyn restaurant Brucie and then closing it at the height of its popularity. From cooking her father his last meal and the unexpected yet beautiful things she found at the bottom of her grief to the relationships she couldn’t save through cooking, like her fractured family and the lover she had to leave in Tuscany, Zahra writes about the immense courage it takes to allow ourselves to be loved, extra sauce and all.

Told with uproarious humor and tremendous insight, Extra Sauce is for anyone who yearns to embrace their whole self, who loves with abandon, and who eats with gusto.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Zahra Tangorra is a chef, restaurant consultant, and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the chef and owner behind the cult-favorite Italian American popup Zaza Lazagna and the beloved former Cobble Hill restaurant Brucie. Brucie and Zaza have been featured in multiple publications and TV shows including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, TIME, The Daily News, Eater, Grub Street, Glamour, MTV, The Martha Stewart Show, and ABC News. Zahra’s writing has been featured in New York Magazine, Lenny Letter, Speaking Broadly, and Epicurious.

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Chapter 1

Fire Everything

Cue Link Wray’s “Fire and Brimstone.”

There was the road, and then, in an instant, there was not.

Asphalt to air rearrangement, a seamless transition, with the exception of a few large thuds early on. I have often wished that I could have replayed this metamorphosis in slow motion, to have seen the exact moment when my face went from soft and supple to rigid with fear and, ultimately, smashed. To have seen all of us who were on this tour bus suspended in air, floating like amateur astronauts, untrained in the art of antigravity exploration and unbraced for impact.

It’s safe to say that my face looked like many other faces at the turn of the twenty-first century: my eyebrows were tweezed so thin that they made Greta Garbo look like Groucho Marx, the lids beneath caked in shimmery shades of white and brown shadow. It is safe to say that my tongue ring was visible if I was screaming, and that my Monroe piercing, and the box-dyed jet black hair that I had cut myself with a tiny pair of scissors meant for snipping thread, made it clear that I was flying off a cliff in the early aughts.

On December 3, 2006, I was twenty-two years old. My parents had known me for twenty-two years, and at that point neither of them liked me very much, and the feeling was mutual. My father and I had not spoken in over a year, a chilly quietness originating from me missing a visit to his house where he had planned to tell me he had cancer. I had canceled because there was a storm that dropped three feet of snow on our town and all of the roads were closed. At the time of the bus crash, I was still not aware that he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, or that he had had a stem cell transplant that nearly killed him. Upon hearing that I had narrowly escaped death, he would not call, instead sending a Get Well card from the drugstore simply signed —John. A card with no message sent in response to one’s child almost passing away tragically is cold, and signing it “John” in place of “Dad” is subzero. When it comes in the mail, I will make it soggy with my tears and then rip it up and throw it in the trash. John would hold a grudge like Kate Winslet at the end of Titanic, letting love sink to the silty, black ocean floor instead of just moving over a few inches.

The time between the first thump, indicating to us that the bus had gone off the road, and when I regained consciousness is mostly lost. I will never know what shapes my face made, how many times my body somersaulted before landing, or how beautiful and macabre we must have all looked for those strange few seconds, entangled with each other in the liminal space of the thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot bus as it soared off the arid southern Californian cliffside. The tape restarts at what I imagine to be seconds after the crash. My body hurt in the way a body tends to when it is in shock, which is not at all. This is the calm before the storm, the smell of the first raindrops. I don’t remember when I felt pain. It must have been in the UC San Diego Hospital between the stops and starts of the morphine drip. I try to remember feeling pain in those early moments, but to feel pain I think you have to believe you are hurt, which I wouldn’t comprehend until my mother, Bobbie, arrived the next day. That was when I knew it was safe to be broken because she would make sure I got put back together; she may not have liked me very much at twenty-two, but she loved me, and that was the glue.

I lost time, I am not sure how much, but when I realized that I was still a part of the world, I was stuck underneath something, or rather someone, twice my size. I managed to slither out from under the man who was passed out on top of me, who thankfully also turned out to still be alive, with that elusive superhuman strength we hear of mothers using to lift cars when their child is trapped underneath. This strength is real. This strength is your will to live. It’s Uma smashing her fist through the casket in Kill Bill Volume 2 and pulling herself up through six feet of dirt for a breath of fresh air. It comes to us from a hidden spot deep within our animus, a powerful surge of adrenaline, divinity, or the third man even, depending on what texts you subscribe to, the voice that whispers into your soul: not yet.

Beyond the twisted burning metal and the man on top of me, I was also stuck beneath something else. Something with an unquantifiable metric that required a different type of strength to move. I was trapped beneath the belief that I was inherently no good and not worth loving.

When I spun off the edge of the canyon, I had been moving through the world in a chaotic gyration of indifference and a quiet desperation to belong. My parents had driven me over that particular cliff long ago, and while clawing my way up from it would take decades, it would begin in this moment, with the same snap of determination to survive. Not consciously, not an epiphany or a chat with God, more like a death or an earthquake that demands you grow around a new gash in your foundation. I was emotionally detached from my family, and myself, as I hung frozen in the sliver between life and death, facing the tribunal, waiting for the verdict. If I’d had the chance to act as my own counsel, I would have argued that despite my apathy toward my life at that exact moment, I did want my parents to know me for another twenty-two years, or at least ten, or until they liked me again. Until I knew how to truly like myself. Until I smelled New York City again on a freezing cold day, or felt prickling on my feet from stepping into a hot bubble bath. I fastened a strong grip around my life and pulled my way to safety, for the chance to fall a thousand more times. Not yet.

•

I found myself in this burning bus because I had gone on tour to sell merchandise for my dear friend Jeffrey Haynes (aka the rapper Mr. Lif), as he embarked on a national and world tour with Boots Riley and The Coup, as a twenty-two-year-old’s interpretation of finding herself, a first real attempt at adultness. I adored Jeffrey. I thought he was the kindest, most interesting person I had ever met, and although much of my hyperbolic thinking as a young woman turned out to be incorrect, this was an astute and wholeheartedly true opinion. He was and is a gentle, wonderfully nerdy, hilarious person who taught me to love the films of Charles Bronson, the perils of capitalism, and the value of living a life guided by feeding one’s inherent creativity. I could have never known as an eighteen-year-old kid that the night we met at The Cop Shop in Smithtown, Long Island, would hold perhaps the most life-altering interactions of my life thus far, but these fateful chapters are so often written in invisible ink. I loved and admired Jeffrey so much that when he asked me to come along on the tour, I quit my job as a display artist at Urban Outfitters immediately, never for a second imagining a world where I did not return. It may have been considered rebellion had anyone cared that I was going in the first place.

At the time of the accident, I had been on the tour for about five days, and I was attempting to ward off the impending melancholia with beer and cigarette smoke. On the flight to San Francisco to meet up with Jeffrey and the twelve others on the tour, I had taken a Xanax and drank three Bloody Marys, and when I got up with my giant winter coat still on to prowl the plane for a fourth, I was escorted back to my seat, belted in, and warned to stay put until everyone else was off of the aircraft. I left my driver’s license on the plane, in the seatback pocket next to the paper bag used for emergency vomiting, and had been desperately trying to have another one mailed to me in one of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The Dial Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593733371
• ISBN 13: 9780593733370
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar