tl;dr: I want to eat everything in it, and I want to cook everything in it, and I definitely want to buy it for our public library.

Thank you to NetGalley and Workman Publishing Company for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I honestly can't wait for this book to come out in June next year because I need a print copy for my shelves!

I love learning about cultures different from my own - through travel, books and food, and this is such a unique idea for a catering company and cookbook. Sharing recipes and meals is an intimate experience and the memories and stories that are so often mixed up with the things we eat can be a tool to bring people together. Living in a city as multicultural as Toronto, I have easy access to foods from all over the world. I remember the first time I tried sushi, when my friend from Iran took me to her favourite Persian restaurant, ripping off pieces of injera at an Ethiopian restaurant and eating nsima in Malawi and Sri Lankan hoppers in Bangladesh.

Eat Offbeat's refugee and immigrant chefs have combined their recipes to create Kitchen without Borders, a collection and celebration of food from Iran, Nepal, Guinea, Iraq, Syria, Eritrea, Venezuela and many other countries besides.

The variety of recipes, some more familiar than others, are divided into sections (think soups, rice and grains, vegetarian dishes, meat dishes, desserts and drinks etc.) and are interspersed with gorgeous food photography, chef highlights, background stories, and photos of them enjoying meals with friends and family, and other interesting tidbits about Eat Offbeat, food, culture and history. These added extras turn this cookbook into something more - an inspiration, a celebration of food, of diversity, and an opportunity to try something new and explore the world from your very own kitchen.

I enjoy reading cookbooks because they provide more than just recipes. Cookbooks give personal stories and a glimpse into different cultures. This cookbook provides both excellently. The reader gets the personal stories of immigrant and refugee chefs from around the world. The recipes provide a glimpse into world cultures through the ingredients and preparation of the food. One of the highlights of this cookbook is a list of lesser known spices and foods at the beginning of the book. The list gives a description of the spice/food, areas it is traditionally used and substitutes in recipes for the item. This book lives up to its name, The Kitchen Without Borders. The people, stories and food easily flow together without being restricted by a border.

The book is worth it even if all you do. Is read the chefs [and interns] stories of old countries and new, whether immigrants or refugees, and look at the brilliant photos of the foods they cook, their kitchens and tables, and their bright and shining faces. The recipes are a bonus allowing you to explore less well known cuisines. It’s time to make your own pomegranate molasses and dive into delicious food. The book encourages you to explore changing recipes to your own tastes so that, like these cooks, you eventually perfect recipes specific to your family's preferences.

Eat Offbeat is a catering kitchen that brings their clients an ever-changing variety of traditional dishes from their team, which consists mostly of refugees who relocated to New York from their respective countries. Uniting and melding their different backgrounds within their recipes, techniques, and processes each chef offers something different to the kitchen. The Kitchen without Borders introduces us to the chefs with background information about each of them including their origins and how they ended up working or interning for Eat Offbeat. My favorite part of this cookbook is the background information provided for each type of recipe in the form of a small prologue of sorts. These bits of information go a long way in getting me interested in this new recipe that is foreign to me in look, taste and ingredients. The introduction to the ingredients that are not easily recognized or procured will be very helpful as a reference when giving these recipes a try. A great cookbook with good looking recipes and the knowledge needed for expanding one's culinary scope

This was a lovely book filled with great stories and some delicious looking recipes. The pages were full of beautifully photographed food and of the chefs. I really enjoyed all of the tips, trick, and substitutions offered for hard to find ingredients. The story behind Eat Offbeat is wonderful and this is a great book full of the chefs' tastes of home.

While travelling the world with my active duty military husband, we sampled many meals that were local staples and grew to love the diversity. Sadly, trying to recreate the tastes is difficult without recipes. The Kitchen Without Borders is an excellent resource for me to bring back those memories through the dishes we were delighted to try. Some ingredients, while not pantry staples for most of us, are readily available in the markets or online. The recipes are clear and easy to follow, giving excellent results to even beginners. I only have one question, when is the next book?

This new cookbook will appeal to those interested in global cuisines and other cultures. This reader especially liked the sections about the cooks' lives in their home country and after coming to the USA. As most recipes were not vegan/vegetarian, I will not be trying them but they were an interesting glimpse into food important to people from other places.

This is a very interesting, unusual, and important book! The recipes, and photos are wonderful. What I loved most about it though is that it gives a face and backstory to these amazing refugees. It makes the world a little more understood and a lot more appreciated.

This is a beautiful cookbook! It takes seemingly intimidating recipes from around the world and makes them approachable and accessible. The pictures are really lovely and makes the book look expensive. Very high quality. I also really enjoyed learning more about each of the Chefs involved, it made the book more personable and friendly. I can't wait to eat everything in this book!

This is so much more than just a cookbook!

It was an absolute delight to hear the interesting and inspiring stories behind these talented chefs. Their recipes have soul and love and so much nourishment. The unexpected flavour combinations and so many of the ingredients are so interesting and is making me want to head to the kitchen and try them!
I loved the variety - from African, Venezuelan, to Middle Eastern and South Asian; the recipes look delicious and quite doable too.

Thanks to NetGalley for giving me a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Loved this cookbook. The stories of individual people and families brought life and personality to this book. Food has such history, nostalgia, and emotions attached to it, I loved being invited into these various kitchens to share their recipes.

The pictures of the food are amazing. Everything looks so good. The recipes are fun and varied, and are great for my family, that try to try cuisine from all around the world.

Simple, easy, delicious recipes await you in this book. I highly recommend the hummus - so versatile and opens avenues for multiple other recipes, as well as any of the curries, and a favorite, the red rice. I had never tried raisins in rice before this, so good.

The Kitchen without Borders is a beautiful cookbook for some many reasons. It goes beyond a traditional cookbook with just recipes to a peek into the people who run the kitchen at Eat Offbeats. I find other cultures fascinating and enjoy food from different places as well, so this was a great cookbook for me, one of my favorites in a long while. I loved reading the stories about the different chefs, and how it included both anecdotes about growing up back home (whether that be Nepal or Iran or numerous other places) as well as moving to a new country and starting over and about their time in The Eat Offbeats kitchen. Most of these chefs are refugees which makes the fact that this company exists even cooler. They have a shared story although all of their stories are different. I recommend this book to anyone who loves to cook or learn new things.

Any cookbook that provides me with three or more good recipes is, in my view, a good cookbook. By those limited standards, The Kitchen Without Borders is a rousing success. Not only was it fascinating to explore the cuisines of the Levant, Algeria, West Africa, Sri Lanka, India and its neighbors, and Venezuela, but the profiles of the intrepid cooks who left their homes and voyaged to America gives voice and face to the modern immigrants who help keep our country a vibrant, growing melting pot. .In this case, the chefs are gathered in the kitchens of Eat Offbeat, a caterer in Long Island City, an area fittingly just across the East River from the United Nations.
While some of the recipes are not your whip-it-out on a work weeknight dishes, many of them are, thanks to detailed coaching on method, easily attainable for the average cook. For a first simple sampler, try their recipes for Hummus or Baba Ganoush. Or Red Rice (basmati rice with tomato, raisins, almonds and fried onion). Then move on to Joloff Rice, a West African staple starring sauced onions and bell peppers..
The use of curry and fenugreek leaves in, for example, Chu La (ground chicken curry from Pakistan-Afghanistan-North India) is repeated in other dishes. These days, neither leaf is difficult to source.
Chicken Shawarma, a take on the ubiquitous mid-eastern street food, is quite simple once you have the spices in house. Then you can go on to concoct such flavorful entrees as Chari Bari (chicken meatballs in a Nepali-spices cashew sauce), and vegetarian soon-to-be-faves such as Adas (lentils pureed with berbere spices) and Toor Dhal (yellow lentil dhal), and Bhonji Carrot Curry (using another favorite ingredient, coconut milk). There's even a fairly simple recipe for dosas, one of my Indian favorites that are almost impossible to find in the U. S.
For any cook with curiosity and a yen to learn new flavor profiles, this is an invaluable source. The chef profiles adds an extra depth to the book. This is as much travelogue and mini-biography of its intrepid cooks as it is a mere collection of recipes. It's actually a collection of lives written in terms of their common love, food.

I love this book a gorgeous book a book of people who have come to America.People who find community friends through the food.Recipies jump off the pages.a book I will be gifting to friends.A book that not only brings joy but shares the immigrant experience through food. #netgalley #workmenpress.

I love this book for so many reasons.

First off, it gives a face to the refugee crisis. These are people like you or me who like to cook a good meal.

Second off, it features flavors and recipes from cuisines I'm otherwise unfamiliar with, like Nepal, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela, for example.

I am excited to tear into this.

This is a lovely refreshing book. It excited me and there are so many recipes I’m looking forward to trying. The stories about the chefs really brings this book to life and in my opinion gives it soul

What a charming and beautiful concept for a cookbook! The Kitchen without Borders features the recipes of chefs working at Eat Offbeat, a NYC catering kitchen. The company’s menu is diverse because its chefs are refugees and immigrants making family recipes from their home nations.

Intermingled with the colorful recipes are short biographies of each chef. Chef Nasrin is from Iran, Hector is from Venezuela, and Rachana is from Nepal. Several others contribute dishes from their native cuisines, creating a cookbook full of recipes from the Levant, Middle East, west Africa, and elsewhere.

Because the chefs come from far and wide, the cookbook doesn’t represent an introduction to any particular cuisine; rather, it’s a trove of inspiration for the curious chef or socially-conscious reader. Many of the recipes call for ingredients that some might find difficult to locate, especially those in rural areas, but the authors also include websites for online ethnic grocers.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful photography, new but accessible recipes, and heartwarming story presented in The Kitchens without Border. I could see it being the perfect gift. Recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and Workman Publishing for allowing me to review an ARC of The Kitchen without Borders.

There's so much to love about this cookbook. I love the mission behind the project -- "Founded in November 2015 by a brother and sister who came to New York from the Middle East, Eat Offbeat is a unique catering company staffed by refugee and immigrant chefs who have found a new home, and new hope, for their lives. Now, in 70 authentic, nourishing recipes, with roots and soul that run as deep as their flavors, The Kitchen without Borders brings the culinary traditions of fourteen chefs from around the world including Syria, Iran, Eritrea, and Venezuela, right to our tables." The book features authentic recipes, gorgeous photos, interesting information, inspiring profiles and more.

Since these are authentic recipes, be prepared to buy some ingredients that you probably don't have in your kitchen. That's just something you have to expect if you want to cook a recipe from the other side of the world and have it taste authentic. Luckily, even for those of us who live in the boonies, international markets and online shops make that easy.

Notes for those on special diets -- many of the recipes are naturally gluten free, though you'll need to read the ingredients yourself to determine whether they are or not. Meats are featured heavily, but vegetarians are likely to find plenty of tasty dishes. Vegans may want to preview the book, since recipes also contain a fair amount of cheeses and such.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

This book was a delight both as a cookbook and as a human interest book. The recipes look delicious and many are quite doable, there is a lovely variety of food, from Venezuelan to Middle Eastern to South Asian to West African. And there are delightful stories about the food and the immigrant and refugee cooks who prepare it. Loved this!