FK #17: A Conversation with Bold Fork Books
Hello and happy Monday!
After a brief hiatus, Fork Knife is back. This week, I’m super happy to post a conversation with Clementine Thomas, owner of Bold Fork Books in DC. Bold Fork is a cookbook and food writing store located in Mt Pleasant, and it’s one of my favorite places in the whole city. Friend of the newsletter and food historian Julia Fine and I chatted with Clementine a few weeks ago, and we’re excited to share this conversation with you.
Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.
CP: I was hoping that you could get us started by telling us a little bit about your life and your path to opening Bold Fork.
CT: So, how far back can we go? I grew up in DC. When I moved back to DC after college, I got into the restaurant scene and sort of fell in love with the industry. Over the years, through working in various positions, always as a front-of-house person, I just became personally obsessed with cookbooks as a way to understand the food that I was serving. I grew up a super, hyper-picky eater. So when I started dating my now-husband, who is Iranian-Thai, it was a way to understand his culture or other cultures that I was being exposed to by finding out more and more, like a window into parts of the world I wasn't personally familiar with.
Also, I look at them as an artifact of my own family history. Julia Child is like a family member in my family. I mean, not literally. But, you know, I still have my great aunt and uncle's copies with all of their notes. I feel like that's true of so many people, especially with a writer as iconic as Julia. There was an aspect of cookbooks as physical objects with meaning, that made me fall in love with them as a thing. Then, as my husband and I started to travel more together, we ended up in a couple of different cities’ cookbook stores, sort of stumbled into them, including a store in Montreal. We completely fell in love because we were able to spend hours browsing the shelves that were filled with all of our favorite things. And then on top of that, you could tell that Appetite for Books was, in addition to just being a cool retail concept, a real community hub for home cooks and the restaurant industry in that city.
And so, as we went on with our lives in the restaurant industry, we started building this retirement dream: when we burn out of restaurants, maybe someday, we'll open up a cookbook store. Over the last five years, the restaurant industry in DC has completely exploded. We began to think more and more about how awesome it would be to have a place that could bring everybody together, both a community space and a hub for inspiration for conversation. We were like, ”Well, maybe one day this will happen.” We're partners in a restaurant called Chez Billy Sud, which is located in Georgetown. Prior to the pandemic, that was where my day-to-day was, and obviously, the pandemic changed everything.
Through our relationship with Emily and Jean Louise, who own Each Peach Market, we had the opportunity to come into their café space and try out the idea. We first started as a pop-up. When they finally made the decision to close the café permanently, we came up with this very pandemic-era space-sharing agreement where they still have the back half for their kitchen operations for the market and then we have the bookstore near the front.
JF: One of the things I love about the shop is your online events. Is there any idea of expanding into more in-person events?
CT: Yes! We actually just announced our first in-person event for next month. We're doing an in-person author talk with Cheryl Day. She just wrote Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking. She'll be in conversation with Kerry Diamond, who's the founder and editor-in-chief of Cherry Bombe. I still cannot believe that this is our first in-person event. I'm going to be an emotional wreck! We’ve done a ton of virtual events, too— for us, that is, because we're so small and new. It’s been great as we were able to connect with moderators, authors, and publishers that we wouldn't otherwise have had access to geographically. So that was really incredible. We learned a lot. But the idea through this fall was to pull back on the virtual stuff and start laying the groundwork for more in-person events. Virtual events still take a lot of planning. As far as the space goes, the plan has always been to open up the curtain. A lot of our planning has just been navigating what people feel comfortable doing. I'm hopeful that in the new year we'll be able to do more in-person programming— not just the author talks but also cooking classes and tastings.
CP: We’ll definitely be signing up for those events! Another thing I'm curious about is what the response in DC has been like so far. As you said, DC has a robust and fast-growing food scene. What's it been like interacting with the community here?
CT: When we were dreaming up this concept of thinking about how to execute it in a brick-and-mortar physical way, it still felt really personal. It had lived in our heads for so long. You know, you can think and dream all you want about other people responding positively, but you don’t know until you put it out there what will happen. So, we had no expectations. It was the middle of the pandemic. We were given the opportunity to take over the front of the space here, so it wasn't a huge financial risk. We weren't taking on a full commercial lease, so that enabled us to see what would happen. It's hard to describe the feeling of being embraced by the community here. It was like they just absorbed us as soon as we unlocked the door. They were basically like, “You are a part of the Mt Pleasant community and we are going to support you every way that we know how.”
Since that point, I feel like the word has gotten out. We see people come in from the ‘burbs; we have a couple of regulars who come down from Baltimore. It feels like it's growing, which is so exciting. I thought people coming from the restaurant industry looking for resources or inspiration would be our bread and butter. But the response from home cooks has been so extraordinary. Everyone has been cooking at home during the pandemic. It’s almost an accident that it happened this way. We're just so lucky. Our customers are such passionate home cooks, too. There's nothing more fun than being in the shop, watching strangers start chatting about their favorite books and recommending titles to one another. We've just been so lucky.
JF: I'm curious about the shop’s expansion into rare books, and it’s made me think about other bookstores with vintage or rare books about food such as Omnivore Books. How are you approaching that project?
CT: We have a family friend who is a professional appraiser for estate sales. He was working on the estate of a friend who recently died. This gentleman, Jack Shaw, was a lifelong civil servant who worked for the State Department under four different administrations. But in addition to this illustrious career, he was also a cookbook collector. When our family friend told me about this, I was like, “Alright, I don't know anything about rare or out-of-print vintage cookbooks, but I'll just see if there's anything that looks cool.”
I went and there was this entire, huge basement full of cookbooks, floor to ceiling. The breadth of topics and eras that were represented on the shelves was fascinating. We ended up making an offer on the entire collection, which was over 1,500 books. We’ve been kind of sitting on them because we knew we had something really special but didn't quite know how to go about curating it. And then, a couple of months ago, Oliver, who is an incredible chef, has cooked all over the world, and happens to be a total cookbook nerd started working with us and took this on as his baby, and it's been so much fun to see. He's really great at identifying what cookbooks would interest customers when they come in looking for something, connecting the right book with the right person. But, it's such a diverse collection that it continues to surprise me when he's pulling out stuff.
We’re also lucky enough to know Celia from Omnivore Books. Sam and I went up there over the summer and we got to hang out a bit. We're always texting her like what about this talk? What do you think this book should be priced? The cookbook community has been so supportive. Every day is something new. It’s so great.
JF: I came in recently to talk to Oliver about those Bengali pamphlets. You mentioned that in the shop’s newsletter, and I was in awe about everything he knew.
CT: He is just so passionate about it. As the shop has grown, that's been one of the real joys. Bringing on Oliver and then also seeing Maddi, who is deeper into the new books and is really just super fluent in social media. Seeing how passionate they are in really different ways and having the pleasure of watching these two people grow our business has been great.
CP: What type of cookbooks seem to be popular and resonate with your customers? Do you see any trends in what people are interested in cooking or learning?
CT: We're just in our first year, so I'm interested to see if there will be consistent seasonal patterns. I also think the pandemic was such a weird time, so it might be hard to infer anything from that. During the pandemic, everyone was super into project cooking, like making sourdough or Beef Wellington for Thanksgiving last year, which are these incredibly technical, complex things. And then, through the spring and summer, I felt like the pendulum was swinging in the opposite direction. Sam Sifton’s no-recipe recipes and stuff like that became popular. Now we've kind of stabilized somewhere in the middle. People have been looking for go-to weeknight ideas, and vegetarian or vegetarian-adjacent ideas as well. We just can't keep Jenny Rosenstrach’s The Weeknight Vegetarians in stock. It’s selling so, so well.
It'll be interesting to see what happens over the holidays, but I imagine that it'll be a lot of fun, new releases that get on some of the year-end of year “best of” lists. We're coming out with our “best of” newsletter next week. I think it'll be a lot of beginner titles, but we'll see. I feel like I'm learning every day what people's preferences are, what they like. And the fun thing about having a store that's small and so rooted in the community is seeing your regulars. Just like working in a restaurant where you know what kind of wine they want to drink before they sit down, you can help them find books that they may enjoy. It's really fun to connect with people.
JF: I know cookbooks are a main focus here, but I love the food writing shelf too. I'm curious if you have any favorites from that section of the shop?
CT: Not so much. Crying in H Mart was a huge seller. The store is actually named after an MFK Fisher book called With Bold Knife and Fork, and I'm always really happy that MFK sells. People are really interested in her writing. It always feels wonderful to introduce her to somebody new. I have a weakness for MFK. I also love Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter. Reading Gabrielle’s book was the first time a food memoir cracked open a world of understanding for me that I didn’t have before. And her writing is just so incredible. As we've been open and we've interacted more and more with people in the community, I’ve noticed such a high density of academics and food policy people in this neighborhood, and in DC generally. Through their recommendations, we’re starting to expand our food policy and food history collections. So that's been interesting. Every day there's such a diversity of interests which is fun. I learn something new every day.
CP: Do you have any favorite newer cookbooks?
CT: This is the hardest question. So I can talk about what I'm most excited about, and forgive the cross-promotion, but I truly, truly think the Cheryl Day cookbook is going to be a classic guide to southern baking. There are a lot of things that make it special. One of the things that I think is most special about it is that Cheryl really explores her own relationship with the South. Her great-great grandmother was an enslaved baker in the South, and Cheryl still has some of her recipes. Not only is this an incredibly comprehensive resource, it's also this very, very personal story. She's able to thread both of those narratives together in a way that paints this really beautiful picture of what it is to be a Southerner today. As someone with Southern family, I was blown away by it.
Another favorite for this past year was Bress ‘N’ Nyam by Matthew Raiford, which is about Gullah-Geechee cuisine from southern coastal Georgia. There are very, very few books about the cuisine, and we did a virtual event with Matthew and his co-author this spring. It was a fascinating conversation, and he is a sixth-generation farmer, which is incredible. His great-great-great-grandfather purchased the land right after emancipation. His story is incredible. His commitment to justice is amazing. And the recipes are really wonderful, too.
There are so many great books out like To Asia, with Love by Hetty McKinnon, too. This season, because so many titles got pushed back from the pandemic, every Tuesday has been like, “Oh my God, so many books!” So it's been super exciting. There are so many really great ones. I look forward to the new year. Hopefully things will quiet down a little bit and I’ll actually spend some time with some of these titles because the next couple of months are gonna be nuts. There's so much excitement and it's so hard to pick favorites.
CP: Do you have any other favorite food spots in DC, restaurants or markets or wine shops, that you like to frequent in your personal life?
CT: That is such a hard question. Since opening the store, we've been here all the time, but I feel like there are so many new places that have opened that I haven't even gotten to checkout. So the list is so long, but I am so excited to be here in Mt Pleasant because even in this three-block radius, we have some of the most exciting food happening in the city. Brad at Elle is great. Nido just opened up down the street, which is a great wine shop. Emily and JL are next door with Each Peach. Martha Dear has some of the best pizza ever. La Tejana is here with their taco pop-up every weekend. It's just so fun to be in a neighborhood where there's so much exciting food happening right outside our door. Our buddy Rick from Manifest Bread Company has a bread subscription. He does a bread delivery here every other week, so we have delicious bread here on the weekend in the space. I'm looking forward to things opening up more and being able to explore. Last year, I really missed sitting at the bar. I feel like that is the best way to explore a new restaurant. I mean, with the farmers’ market on Saturdays, it's just wonderful.
JF: We also find ourselves in this three-block radius very often.
CP: Mt Pleasant Street is wonderful! We often end up here on the weekends to grab some wine or eat lunch.
CT: We actually are hosting our in-person event with Cheryl Day at Past Tense Yoga Studio. There is a synchronicity between the businesses here like that's incredible for home cooks. There are just so many resources here. It’s really fun.
We’re so thankful to Clementine for speaking with us. Go check out Bold Fork Books in person (3064 Mt Pleasant St NW) or online whenever you have a chance!
Favorite Cookbooks from Bold Fork
I’ve had the pleasure of shopping at Bold Fork many times, and here are a few of my favorite purchases (great for gifts or just for yourself):
À Table by Rebekah Peppler: A super fun book about French food written for young people. I’ve really enjoyed recipes such as the lentil salad with persillade and the caramelized endive salad. There are several cocktail recipes in the book too, which is a big plus.
Dinner by Melissa Clark: Tons of great and easy dinner ideas, with many vegetarian/pescatarian options. We really enjoyed the garlicky lemon chicken with capers and anchovies from this book, which we made last night.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan: Not a cookbook, but a good piece of food writing for those interested in learning more about foodways and the (un)sustainability of our diets.
I’ve also heard from you all about some cookbooks worth checking out: Sam Sifton’s See You on Sunday, Hetty McKinnon’s To Asia, with Love, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, Carla Lalli Music’s Where Cooking Begins and That Sounds So Good, and the Joy of Cooking (old hardcover edition). I also have my eye on Italian American and the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook.
Favorite recent bites
Had an absolutely fantastic meal at Lutèce in DC last week— great natural wine list, cocktails, food, and dessert made for one of the best meals I’ve had in DC this year. They’re still doing outdoor dining, too!
Ever since eating at 12 Chairs for my friend Kristen’s birthday, I haven’t been able to forget about their roasted cauliflower with creamy, garlicky tahini sauce. This is a close approximation, and I’ve made it several times in the past month.
St Vincent for a cheese plate and a bottle of pét-nat split between friends
Raw and roasted kale (from the Dupont farmer’s market!) with pistachios and pecorino
I have the best friends in the world, who gifted me the Bonne Maman jam advent calendar. I’m feeling very cool girl and enjoying jam and cream cheese on a bagel every morning.