A raw and raucous memoir from chef and writer Zahra Tangorra about the great meals and great loves of her life, reflecting on family, friendship, grief, and the solace that can be found through food Extra sauce is how I like my pizza and also how I fall in love. Extra sauce is for sopping, dunking, and licking off your plate. Licking off your fingers. It is a tiny demand for freedom and hedonism. Life has told you this is the amount of joy you get, and you say: That is simply not enough. At twenty-two years old, Zahra Tangorra was trying on adulthood and attempting to find herself when a harrowing near-death experience stopped her in her tracks. It felt like a twisted version of a second chance. Who am I? she asked herself. What do I love? The answers started coming to her: Stuffed shells and giant meatballs at J&J’s, the Italian red sauce joint of her Long Island childhood. Her mother’s chocolate mousse pie and her father’s sweet and savory pea soup. The people, places, and experiences that made her her, the relationships both loving and fraught—they were all, for better and sometimes worse, inextricably bound up with food. In this memoir that celebrates both the delicious and the messy in life, Zahra reckons with the adrenaline-filled highs and devastating lows of opening cult-favorite Brooklyn restaurant Brucie and then closing it at the height of its popularity. From cooking her father his last meal and the unexpected yet beautiful things she found at the bottom of her grief to the relationships she couldn’t save through cooking, like her fractured family and the lover she had to leave in Tuscany, Zahra writes about the immense courage it takes to allow ourselves to be loved, extra sauce and all. Told with uproarious humor and tremendous insight, Extra Sauce is for anyone who yearns to embrace their whole self, who loves with abandon, and who eats with gusto. “ Extra Sauce is the exact right title for Zahra Tangorra’s debut memoir, which is big-hearted, funny, tragic, and bursting with juicy, messy stories. Her compelling voice, her lacerating self-awareness, and her total embrace of all life’s beauty and heartbreak add up to one of the best food books I’ve read in years.” —Laurie Woolever, author of Care and Feeding: A Memoir “Zahra Tangorra’s memoir is zesty, gutsy, and fully engages all the senses. I was riveted by her potent story and hungry to make her recipes to get a taste of the life she’s led.” —Dana Cowin “ Extra Sauce is a memoir that feeds both body and soul; lush, fearless, and tender, with sentences as rich and flavorful as the recipes that accompany each chapter. Zahra Tangorra writes about all the things we carry to the table—the loves and losses that transform us—with rare honesty and nerve, reminding us that we should live and eat with appetite and abundance.” —Ruth Reichl “Zahra Tangorra sits us down for a meal of nostalgia, heartbreak, grief, love, and selfhood on her way to a present life of satiety that is about so much more than food. This memoir felt like a seat at an old friend’s table, where wine is poured and stories are told until two in the morning, all of us picking at the remains of Zaza Lasagna, Not My Grandfather’s Meatballs, and Chocolate Mousse Pie while cracking open one more bottle of Lambrusco. Extra Sauce is a book that sates the tongue and the heart.” —Jill Damatac, author of Dirty Kitchen Zahra Tangorra is a chef, restaurant consultant, and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the chef and owner behind the cult-favorite Italian American popup Zaza Lazagna and the beloved former Cobble Hill restaurant Brucie. Brucie and Zaza have been featured in multiple publications and TV shows including The New Yorker , The New York Times , The Village Voice , TIME , The Daily News , Eater , Grub Street , Glamour , MTV, The Martha Stewart Show , and ABC News. Zahra’s writing has been featured in New York Magazine , Lenny Letter , Speaking Broadly , and Epicurious .