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Fieldwork

Not long after Iliana Regan’s celebrated debut, Burn The Place, became the first food-related title in four decades to become a National Book Award finalist, her career as a Michelin-star-winning chef took a sharp turn north. Long based in Chicago, she and her new wife, Anna, decided to create a culinary destination, the Milkweed Inn, located in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, where much of the food served to their guests would be foraged by Regan herself in the surrounding forest and nearby river. Part fresh challenge, part escape, Regan’s move to the forest was also a return to her rural roots, in an effort to deepen the intimate connection to nature and the land that she’d long expressed as a chef, but experienced most intensely growing up.

As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigan’s boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with her and Anna’s efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that’s suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the covid-19 pandemic. She discovers where the wild blueberry bushes bear tiny fruit, where to gather wood sorrel, and where and when the land’s different mushroom species appear—even as surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the area’s birds. Along the way she struggles not only with the threat of covid, but also with her personal and familial legacies of fear, addiction, violence, and obsession—all while she tries to conceive a child that she and her immune-compromised wife hope to raise in their new home.

With Burn The Place, Regan announced herself as a writer whose extravagant, unconventional talents matched her abilities as a lauded chef. In Fieldwork, she digs even deeper to express the meaning and beauty we seek in the landscapes, and stories, that reveal what informs, shapes, and nurtures our lives.

Burn the Place

A singular, powerfully expressive debut memoir that traces one chef’s fight to the top—from farm girl in rural Northwest Indiana to Michelin-starred restaurant owner in Chicago—and what happens once she gets there. Burn The Place is a galvanizing culinary memoir that chronicles Iliana Regan’s journey from gigging frogs on the family farm to opening her nationally acclaimed restaurant Elizabeth. Her story is alive with startling imagery, raw like that first bite of wild onion, and told with uncommon emotional power. Regan grew up the youngest of four headstrong girls on a small farm in Northwest Indiana. Even when she was still in diapers, Regan understood to pick only the ripe fruit. In the family’s leaf-strewn fields, the orange flutes of chanterelles seemed to beckon her while they eluded others. Regan has always had an intense, almost otherworldly connection with food and earth—it’s people that have always been harder. As she learned to cook in the farmhouse, got her first job in a professional kitchen at age fifteen, taught herself cutting-edge cuisine while running her “new forager” underground supper club, and worked her way from front-of-house staff to running her own kitchen, Regan often felt that she “wasn’t made for this world.” She was a little girl who longed to be a boy, gay in an intolerant community, an alcoholic before she turned twenty, a woman in an industry dominated by men. Burn The Place will introduce readers to an important new voice from the culinary scene, an underrepresented perspective from the professional kitchen, and a young star chef whose voice is as memorable and deserving of praise as her food.