Spain My Way by José Andrés Review: A Cookbook Full of Spanish Generosity, Memory and Appetite

Some cookbooks are built for quick reference. Others are built for lingering over, preferably with a coffee, a glass of something cold, or the slightly dangerous conviction that one Spanish feast at home could quite easily become your entire weekend plan.

Spain My Way: Eat, Drink, and Cook Like a Spaniard by José Andrés belongs firmly in the second camp.

Spain My Way was kindly provided by HarperCollins for review purposes. Editorial control remains with the author. This article contains a sponsored book link, meaning I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend books, places, experiences and products that fit the editorial tone and standards of Culinary Travels.

This generous, richly illustrated cookbook is part recipe collection, part memoir, part love letter to Spain. It brings together some of Andrés’s most beloved Spanish dishes, from the classics many readers will immediately recognise to regional recipes and personal favourites shaped by home, travel, restaurants, family and memory.

Photograph: Joan Pujol-Creus

See current details for Spain My Way by José Andrés.

José Andrés is, of course, one of the most recognisable Spanish chefs working internationally today. He helped introduce modern tapas to American diners, built a major restaurant group, wrote bestselling cookbooks, worked across television, and founded World Central Kitchen, the humanitarian organisation that has become central to his public life.

The press material describes Spain My Way as his most personal cookbook to date, and that is exactly where its appeal lies. This is not simply a chef presenting a national cuisine from a distance. It is a book about the Spain that made him: the place where he learned “to cook, learned to eat, and most important, learned to enjoy food.”

Photograph: Joan Pujol-Creus

A Spanish cookbook rooted in appetite, memory and place

That sense of enjoyment runs through the book. The tone is lively, warm and authoritative without feeling dry or dutiful. Andrés writes as someone who wants readers not only to reproduce a dish, but to understand the spirit behind it.

Spanish cooking, as presented here, is not treated as a fixed museum piece. It is practical, convivial, regional and generous, built around strong ingredients, careful technique and the pleasure of gathering around the table. Food, in Spain My Way, is rooted in conversation, welcome and appetite.

The recipes range from familiar cornerstones of Spanish cooking, including tortilla de patatas, gazpacho and paella Valenciana, to regional and personal dishes such as Andalusian chickpea salad, Basque-style ribeye steak, Fabada Asturiana from Andrés’s native Asturias, and the flan his mother, Marisa, taught him to make.

It is the sort of cookbook that invites flagging pages rather than simply reading straight through. A sauce, a tapas idea, a slow-cooked dish, a dessert with family history behind it: the appeal is cumulative, with one recipe quietly leading to another.

There are stories from his career too, including his early training under Ferran Adrià at el Bulli and his part in the legal importation of jamón Ibérico to the United States. These details give the book a sense of professional history, but they never pull it away from the kitchen table. The emphasis remains on food as something lived, shared and remembered.

Food as geography: Spain by dish, memory and mood

For Culinary Travels readers, what makes Spain My Way particularly appealing is that it understands food as geography. It is not just asking what Spaniards cook, but how they eat, why certain dishes matter, and what ingredients, habits and rituals reveal about place.

Photograph: Joan Pujol-Creus

That gives the book a travel-writing quality as much as a culinary one. You move through Spain by dish, but also by mood: the freshness of gazpacho, the comfort of fabada, the ceremony of paella, the pleasure of tapas, and the sweetness of a family flan.

Reading it, I kept finding myself pulled less towards a single recipe and more towards a way of eating: bread on the table, olive oil close to hand, something bubbling or crisping or being sliced for sharing, and the quiet understanding that food is rarely just food. It is weather, region, family habit, the time of day, the bottle opened beside it, and the people gathered around it.

It also stirred something familiar from my own travels in Spain: the brightness of food eaten in the heat, the pleasure of a table that is not rushed, the tiled-bar feeling of ordering something small and good, and the way a dish can carry the atmosphere of a place long after you have left it.

I have not travelled through every region represented here, but reading Spain My Way brought back fragments of my own travels in Spain, from Murcia and Málaga to Nerja, Gaucín, Ronda and beyond: sunlit streets, market produce, olive oil, seafood, mountain air, and the Spanish gift for making eating feel both everyday and celebratory.

The best cookbook writing makes you hungry before it makes you organised. Spain My Way does that beautifully. It has the feel of being talked into the kitchen by someone who has strong opinions, deep knowledge and no interest in making food feel timid.

There is a confidence here that is infectious. Andrés wants you to cook, but he also wants you to taste properly, to pay attention, and to understand why Spanish food can be both simple and technically precise.

A cookbook to read, cook from and keep on the table

This is also a visually handsome book. Joan Pujol-Creus’s photography gives it the kind of texture that matters in a cookbook like this: colour, movement, ingredients, finished dishes, and that sense of abundance that makes Spanish food feel so closely tied to shared eating.

The images support the atmosphere of the book rather than simply decorating it. They help build the sense that Spanish food is not only about recipes, but about tables, places, people and appetite.

As a practical cookbook, Spain My Way will probably suit readers who enjoy cooking with a sense of occasion. It is not the book I would reach for purely because I need dinner on the table in twenty minutes, although there are undoubtedly simpler dishes within it.

Its real strength is as a book to cook from when you want food to feel expansive: a weekend lunch, a dinner with friends, a Spanish-themed feast, or a slower kitchen day when chopping, stirring, tasting and setting the table are all part of the pleasure.

Photograph: Joan Pujol-Creus

It also works as a highly readable food book even before you cook anything from it. That is often the mark of a strong chef-authored cookbook. The recipes matter, but so do the stories, the context, the little asides and the sense of voice. Spain My Way has that voice in abundance.

It is the sort of cookbook that makes you start mentally arranging a meal before you have finished reading the page: something salty to begin, something generous in the middle, something sweet and almond-scented at the end.

There is a lovely generosity to the whole project. Spain, in these pages, is not reduced to a few familiar clichés. It is presented through technique, region, family, memory, produce and the daily act of eating well.

For anyone interested in Spanish food, culinary travel, or cookbooks that carry a strong sense of place, Spain My Way earns its place on the kitchen shelf.

Verdict: is Spain My Way worth reading?

Spain My Way is a vibrant, personal and deeply appetising celebration of Spanish cooking from one of its most passionate modern ambassadors. It is ideal for readers who want a cookbook that offers more than recipes: a book full of flavour, story, place and the sheer pleasure of gathering around the table.

Spain My Way: Eat, Drink, and Cook Like a Spaniard by José Andrés is published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, on 2 July, in hardback at £35. Review copy kindly provided by HarperCollins.

See current details for Spain My Way by José Andrés.

Save this Spain My Way review for later if you love Spanish food, culinary travel and cookbooks with a strong sense of place.

Note: Images reproduced courtesy of HarperCollins. Photography from Spain My Way by Joan Pujol-Creus.

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