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Have you heard of a staff meal? If you’ve ever worked in the restaurant industry, you probably have, but many people may not be familiar with the term. A staff meal is a meal that is prepared for the staff of a restaurant in between service hours. At first glance it looks like it's only a necessity — feeding the team before they get back to work — but authors Christine Carroll and Jody Eddy see a staff meal as much more, and they illustrate this through their first co-authored cookbook, Come In, We’re Closed: An Invitation to Staff Meals at the World’s Best Restaurants.

A collection of more than 100 recipes, the cookbook is grand in scale and contains pages and pages of beautiful photography — it would look just as good on your coffee table as it does in your kitchen, but we recommend you cook with it. The foreword by Ferran Adrià sets the tone for a journey that travels all over the world to some of the world’s best restaurants, where Carroll and Eddy take you inside and invite you pull up a chair at the restaurants' staff meals. The cookbook not only gives you an intimate look at some of the most well-respected and critically acclaimed kitchens, but it also illustrates the beauty and importance of a staff meal and why so many in the restaurant industry cherish them today.

"[Staff meals are] the distillation of the hospitality business; why people went into the business in the first place," explains Carroll in an interview with The Daily Meal, "[They’re] to feed their soul, feed their spirit."

Read the rest at The Daily Meal.