Kitchen Arts and Letters doesn’t present as one of the world’s great bookshops. It has no library ladders or espresso bar, no smell of bookworm or brass polish, and nowhere to sit. It has only slightly more bookish allure than the nail salons and hardware stores that surround it on a commercial block of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But since opening in 1983, it has been a destination bookstore for chefs, cooks, academics and eccentrics from around the world.

Kitchen Arts and Letters is not where you go to find all the cookbooks. It is where you go to find the right cookbooks.

‘People come to us to cut through the noise.’

What the small storefront does house is a very deep knowledge of a very narrow subject: books about food. And that knowledge is rewarded by the kind of loyalty that induces customers to drop thousands of dollars at a clip, mostly based on the recommendations of Nach Waxman, its founder, and Matt Sartwell, the managing partner.