Not a Cookbook takes its title as a wager. Robby Reis, a Canadian filmmaker and artist, spent years embedded at Resto Palme, a Caribbean restaurant in Montreal run by Lee-Anne Millaire Lafleur and Ralph Alerte, and the book he made from that proximity is not a menu, a memoir, or a conventional portrait of a small business. It is a collage-style assembly — photographs, written texts, and contributions gathered from customers and staff — in which a restaurant becomes the organizing principle for thinking about family, friendship, and labor.
The approach is deliberately nonlinear. Reis is not a detached observer but a longtime friend of the household, and the book’s structure reflects that intimacy: rather than a clean narrative arc, the material accumulates, allowing the daily pressures of running a family business to sit alongside the peripheral stories that a more polite book would leave out. Racism, activism, and the emotional work of sustaining something shared and sacred are treated not as digressions but as part of the kitchen’s actual texture.
There is a further turn in the book’s relationship to its subject. Despite the title, a few family recipes do appear. But when it comes to the ingredients that make a certain sauce what it is, Alerte declines to say, offering only that he cannot give it away. That refusal, handled without sentimentality, is of a piece with the book’s larger proposition: it is less concerned with what is on the plate than with everything that makes the plate possible, and it proposes a new model for the cookbook as a radical kitchen guide rooted in community, resilience, and love.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in that formal restlessness as much as in its subject. Reis arrives from filmmaking, and his first book treats sequence, voice, and multiple contributors as materials to be arranged rather than illustrated. The result is a body of work about a specific Montreal restaurant that resists the documentary conventions such a project might invite, and it carries a distinct position among recent photo-text publications.
Not a Cookbook was published by TBW Books in 2025. It runs 80 pages at 203.2 × 254 mm and is issued as a spiral-bound paperback with flaps. It received the 2026 Book Award in the Photo-Text category, hosted by Les Rencontres d’Arles.
