We are back with our restaurant cookbook reviews, and today we look at BiBi: The Cookbook by Chet Sharma, published by Phaidon.
This highly anticipated debut captures the essence of one of London’s most distinctive restaurants, where heritage, intellect, and emotion come together in a new expression of modern Indian cooking.
At its heart, BiBi The Cookbook is an homage to family, to grandmothers, and to the power of food to carry emotion across generations. “BiBi” is the affectionate Urdu term for grandmother, and Chet’s book unfolds as both love letter and laboratory notebook: a space where nostalgia meets meticulous technique.
Before becoming a chef, Chet earned a doctorate in physics, and that analytical curiosity infuses every recipe. Yet behind the precision lies warmth. His stories trace summers spent in the Indian subcontinent, flavors inherited rather than learned, and the joy of transforming memory into movement — a simmer, a char, a scent.
Across 256 pages and more than 100 photographs, BiBi The Cookbook unfolds in chapters that reflect the rhythm of the restaurant — street food, garden, sea, pasture, and dessert — ending with a generous “Essentials” section that demystifies the masalas, stocks, and sauces that define Chet’s kitchen.
The recipes are vibrant yet restrained: Nimbu Pani, Wookey Hole Cheese Papad, and Sharmaji’s Lahori Chicken showcase a chef who respects the past while fearlessly editing it. Each dish is accompanied by a short reflection, turning technical recipes into stories of discovery and belonging.
The photography in this book amplifies this intimacy, smoky grills, bursts of color, a kitchen at work. The visual storytelling feels lived-in, not staged; every frame hums with the energy of BiBi itself.
More than a solitary chef’s chronicle, this is also a book of voices. Guest essays and reflections from Trevor Noah, Aziz Ansari, and Hans Zimmer speak to BiBi’s reach beyond cuisine, as a place of connection, generosity, and cultural curiosity.
These contributions complement Chet’s narrative, offering glimpses of how a restaurant built on family memory became a modern institution. It’s a reminder that food, at its best, is communal: an exchange of stories as much as flavors.
BiBi’s cocktails, plating, and design, all briefly touched upon, round out the portrait of a restaurant where every detail has intention.
BiBi The Cookbook is not just a documentation of recipes but a meditation on inheritance, how we take what we’re given and make it our own. Chet writes with humility and clarity, offering a blueprint for progressive Indian cuisine that honors tradition while creating new ones.
Whether you’ve eaten at BiBi or not, this book will make you feel like you have, full, inspired, and moved by what food can mean.
BiBi The Cookbook is a soulful, precise, and beautifully designed debut from Chet Sharma, a balance of science and sentiment, fire and finesse. It stands among Phaidon’s finest restaurant monographs, capturing a chef and a cuisine in motion.
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