There’s plenty to learn in the book about Alvarez herself, too. You can learn, for instance, that the food she cooks today is mostly a product of her professional cooking life in California. But her passion for food came before that, growing up in a Cuban American household in Miami, watching her mother, Rosa, and Aida, her Cuban grandmother, in the kitchen.

The restaurant where Alvarez found her sound was also in northern California and, like The French Laundry, it had a notable reputation for the quality of its ingredients. But in just about every other respect, Chez Panisse was a very different place.

It was Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook that first took her from Florida to California. “I read it as a student in culinary college and thought, my god, there could be nothing better.” The stories about the farmers and suppliers – the lobster fisherman on the east coast, the orchard where they’d buy their fruit – all of this was foreign to Alvarez growing up in Miami. “We just didn’t have produce like that.”

She wrote a letter to The French Laundry and was accepted as an intern in 2006. If she had been drawn in by romantic ideas of the restaurant’s approach, her first experience there jolted her into reality. “I walked in and I was a little bit early because I wanted to be on time. I’ll never forget it: a chef said to me, ‘don’t ever show up early again’. I said, oh, god, why? And he said, ‘when you do that someone has to stop what they’re doing to show you around and everything in a restaurant has a time. Everything is timed to the minute, so you can’t just be throwing that out’. I thought, wow, okay, this is not what I thought it was going to be.” Alvarez learned a great deal from that experience, “and I learned a lot about what I didn’t want to explore.”

“If you’re a talented, caring, strong individual, there are ways of building things around you. We need more people like that, and the last thing I want to do is discourage anyone from joining an industry that has given me everything.”