Chef Todd Richards Wins American Cookbook Award

From Chef Todd Richard-Chef Todd Richards’ debut cookbook SOUL: A Chef’s Culinary Evolution in 150 Recipes was named this year’s winner of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) American Cookbook Award on Saturday, May 18 in Santa Fe, New Mexico during the 2019 IACP Annual Conference. Richards serves the Culinary Director of Jackmont Hospitality, overseeing Jackmont Hospitality restaurant operations such as One Flew South and Chicken+Beer, as well as operations at Jackmont Hospitality brands at LAX. He is also the chef/owner of Richards’ Southern Fried in Atlanta.

SOUL: A Chef’s Culinary Evolution in 150 Recipes was released May 22, 2018 by Oxmoor House and Southern Living, a division of Meredith Corporation. In SOUL, Richards shares his culinary journey from Chicago to Atlanta detailing the soul food of his childhood and the award-winning cuisine he makes as a chef, as well as his fresh take on bedrock ingredients like collards, pork, and sweet potatoes. The chapters in Soul are organized by featured ingredients and each chapter starts with a relatively traditional recipe and progresses alongside Richards’ exploration of modern flavor combinations and techniques. SOUL has been hailed as one of Garden & Gun's Best Books of 2018 as well as Amazon's Best Cookbook of 2018. Richards and SOUL have been featured in The New York Times, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, People, Esquire, CBS This Morning and more. Chef Todd Richards says of this momentous achievement: “Winning the IACP award is one of the greatest highlights of my career that continues to celebrate Soul food as a cuisine in the modern context.”

On the honor of this award, IACP states that “Being acknowledged as a finalist or winner has become a coveted mark of distinction, in part because of the program’s growing list of illustrious honorees, who, over the years, have included Mark Bittman, Julia Child, Dorie Greenspan, Thomas Keller, J. Kenji López-Alt, and Yotam Ottolenghi, among others. Our program requires recipe testing in all relevant awards categories. Last year, the program received over 500 exceptional submissions.”