The Mona Pizza Recipe Book

We all like to think we're classy bon viveurs cutting about town, eating, drinking, and being merry. Well, we aren't. Many of us will in fact spend our evenings munching on bland, processed food that looks as though it's been put through a sepia filter before landing on the plate/pile of old newspapers.

The solution would be to cook more whilst maintaining an air of cool. The Mona Pizza recipe book offers a potential solution, presenting a host of bands and musicians contributing their own recipes. Hence, the hip and happening life of the musician meets the practice of chopping onions and
leaving things to simmer.

And chop you will. Recipes are well-written and for the most part surprisingly detailed. However, there are some which let the side down. I mean, juice? A recipe for juice? Juice? We end up with a curious mix of insultingly basic and pleasingly straightforward culinary experiments.

While the content is nicely varied, for a book ostensibly written by 20 different people there isn't much to one apart from the other. No blurbs explaining inspirations, no chit-chat about what makes their dish work, not even any tour van anecdotes about suspicious milk; we just get the recipes.

That said, the illustrations throughout are cracking, so when the singer from Portishead tells you to put some fish in a pitta you will at least have something nice to look at. Ultimately, the Mona Pizza is an intriguing but flawed curio, serving as a reminder that even the rock and roll among us don't live it up all the time.