For flavor-craving, art-loving, community-celebrating homecooks, the first cookbook from Lil’ Deb’s Oasis, a James Beard Award-nominated hotspot in Hudson, New York, serves up seventy tropical comfort recipes, alongside musings on wine, music, love, sex, friendship, and fashion.

When Carla Perez-Gallardo and Hannah Black first crossed paths in the Hudson Valley it was culinary kismet. Both had turned to the food world after art school, and their collaboration quickly evolved from popular pop-up dinners to the 2016 opening of their restaurant in Hudson, where they have created an oasis of pleasure and community, with nourishment and connection as the central tenets.

In Please Wait to Be Tasted (a phrase posted in the restaurant’s waiting area) home cooks are invited into the rainbow-colored world of Lil’ Deb’s Oasis via recipes steeped in hot, sticky, juicy, moist fever-dreams of flavor, stories of the restaurant’s origins as an art installation of kitschy visual delight, and all manner of advice-how to throw a tamale party or pen a wine poem. Recipes mesh deep respect for cultural traditions with a twist of irreverence-Sweet Plantains with Green Cream, Ceviche Mixto with Popcorn, Fishbone Soup, Charred Octopus in the Ink of Its Cousin, Whole Fried Fish, and Abuela’s Flan-and are organized into chapters that align the many pleasures of Lil’ Deb’s with the throws of romantic encounters.

A foreword by neo-soul singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello attests to the love and magic of the food and friendship that has made her a regular at Lil’ Deb’s Oasis.