By Coral Gables Gazette staff
Bobby Hicks has a theory about why Americans keep reaching for the dishes their grandparents made. It is not sentimentality exactly, he has said, and it is not irony. It is something closer to the pleasure of rediscovering that food cooked from scratch in an earlier era — Chicken Divan, Brown Sugar Meatloaf, Lazy Daisy Cake — was actually good. Sometimes very good. That argument, made with warmth and considerable research across Hicks’s viral Retro Recipes Kitchen series, is now the basis of a debut cookbook, and Books & Books is bringing the author home for the release.
Retro Recipes: Vintage Dishes with a Modern Twist (Countryman Press, $35) arrives in Coral Gables on Wednesday, June 10, when Hicks appears at 265 Aragon Ave. for a free evening event beginning at 7 p.m. Books will be available for purchase on site. The event is open to the public; an RSVP is requested and early arrival is advised, as seating is not guaranteed.
A viral kitchen built on curiosity
Hicks, a South Florida native, built his following through TikTok’s Retro Recipes Kitchen, where he revisits dishes from the early 1900s through the 1970s with the instincts of someone equally comfortable with a whisk and a library card. A former bartender who describes himself as a self-taught cook and accidental food historian, he brings genuine curiosity to dishes that the food world spent decades dismissing — the casseroles, the gelatin molds, the canned-soup innovations that fed midcentury America with more ingenuity than they are usually credited for. His audience, which now numbers in the millions across platforms, responded to exactly that quality: the sense that someone was taking these recipes seriously on their own terms.
Nostalgia with footnotes
The 240-page cookbook that resulted contains 100 dishes drawn from the classic and the lesser-known alike — Boeuf Bourguignon alongside Eggs Eiffel Tower, Pineapple Upside-Down Poke Cake alongside Butterscotch Bread Pudding. Each recipe carries historical context tracing the dish to its origins, a feature that distinguishes the book from nostalgia-as-aesthetic projects and gives it the texture of genuine scholarship done in an accessible register. Vibrant food photography and period-inflected illustration round out a volume that reads as much as a cultural document as a cooking manual.
That blend helps explain why retro cooking has found a new audience online. For younger viewers, the appeal is often discovery: recipes that look strange at first but reveal the logic of their era. For older viewers, the dishes carry memory without requiring the book to become sentimental. Hicks’s gift is treating both reactions seriously.
The research behind it was, by Hicks’s own account, obsessive. While competing as a semifinalist on Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef — filming the fourth season in Ireland — he filled his suitcase with vintage cookbooks and studied them between takes, testing and cataloguing recipes drawn from a generation of home cooks who improvised with what the postwar American pantry provided. “For the last five or more years, I have said that my brand isn’t recreating weird or silly dishes — my brand is recreating nostalgia,” he writes in the book’s introduction. The distinction matters: Hicks is not in the business of laughing at aspic. He is in the business of understanding why aspic existed and what it tasted like when someone made it well.
The Books & Books appearance is part of a national tour that has taken Hicks to independent bookstores across the country, and the Coral Gables stop carries the particular resonance of a South Florida author returning to his own region with his first book. Books & Books, which has hosted the city’s most significant literary conversations for decades, is a fitting venue for a writer whose work sits at the intersection of culinary craft, popular history, and the kind of storytelling that travels equally well on a phone screen and a printed page.
Retro Recipes: An Evening with Bobby Hicks. Wednesday, June 10, 7 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Free and open to the public. RSVP recommended. Books available for purchase on site.
