Chicago has many great independent and specialty bookstores, like feminist bookstore Women & Children First, but with Read It & Eat, a culinary bookstore joins the literary landscape. The shop, which opened in Lincoln Park in May 2015, came about after Esther S. Dairiam, a former management consultant, visited Paris two years ago and went on a food tour, which included Librairie Gourmande, a culinary bookstore.
“I remember having dinner that night and Googling places in Chicago that might have a similar concept, and there wasn’t one,” Dairiam said. “So I wrote a business plan, attended some classes to learn about the business and started to pull things together.” She also visited other culinary bookstores around the country—Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York, Omnivore Books on Food in San Francisco and Book Larder in Seattle—and she planned her shop.
Read It & Eat is half bookstore, with shelves lined with cookbooks, food memoirs, food history books and reference materials, and half kitchen space, where chefs come in for demos and events. There are also hands-on cooking classes and a book club that meets monthly to try recipes from a book.