Little Pine is the second restaurant launched by Moby, arguably the OG celebrity vegan. For some reason, I passed over this book of recipes from the eatery several times before I picked it up. I’m glad I finally did. It’s an attractive, nicely sized hardcover with clear, readable print and enticing photos.

The book is broken down into seven chapters: Little Pine Staples, Brunch, Soups and Salads, Small Plates and Sides, Hearty Mains and Large Plates, Desserts and Drinks. This is one of the great things about restaurant-inspired cookbooks — you often find these more unusual sections like brunch and drinks. As you work through the recipes, however, you will find one of the challenges of restaurant-inspired cookbooks, which is that the recipes often require you make or have batches on hand of the staples used at scale in the restaurant, turning fairly simple dishes into complex, or at least time-consuming ones. Let’s take a look:

The Staples section is the main reason this book is going to stay within easy reach in your kitchen. I tried a number of recipes from this chapter, first among them, the Cultured Butter. Yes, Virginia, you can make your own vegan butter right in the comfort of your own home. It’s made much like vegan cheese, with cashews and coconut oil and couple of other things. You will need to make an initial investment in a bottle of sunflower lecithin, but after that you can keep batches of this stuff in the freezer and break off chunks as you need them. This butter is for eating -the book has a separate recipe for butter for baking – but you’ll eat a lot of it. There is a certain satisfaction in being able to make a staple like this oneself.

What is better than butter? Why Fudge Sauce of course. I will not lie – I do not decline a small nondairy sundae from time to time, and this fudge sauce is easy to whip up and keep around. No need to use it on a sundae, either. I occasionally put a dollop on an Biscoff or an Oreo and am a very happy girl because of it. You can also add a spoonful of the Coconut Whipped Cream. This is a pretty standard recipe, but now you have it at your fingertips. There are savory staples in addition to the butters such as Broth Powder, which is kind of like a loose bullion. I made some to go in the Potato Leek Soup, and it worked nicely. I also made the Cashew Cream Cheese, which was less successful, but that’s probably on me because I used roasted instead of raw cashews, and I don’t yet own a Vitamix, so the blend was not as smooth as it should be.

My oh my, the Brunch section. Who doesn’t love a cookbook with a brunch section? So many temptations here, like Strawberry Pop-Tarts and Pumpkin Pancakes. I decided to take a deep breath and do something I’ve never done before and make bagels. Friends, I had NO hope that this would actually work. I struggled with the recipe a bit, because the “sponge” seemed way too watery, so I added some flour. But then the amount of flour to be added at the next step seemed like way too much, even allowing for how much I added previously. As you can see, I had a little problem.

So imagine my surprise when…. they worked! I did it! I really made bagels.

They aren’t better than ones you would buy, but if you are looking to impress your friends who will invariably shout, “What?? You MADE these BAGELS??” This book is for you.

Emboldened, the kid and I next set out to make croissants. This requires laminating dough, which of course everyone now knows how to do thanks to the Great British Baking Show. But again, somehow some proportion seemed to be off – too much flour or too little liquid and the dough was very, very stiff. The finished product kind of looked like a croissant, and there were definitely layers, but the taste and texture was more like that of a dinner roll than a croissant.

The same dough is used in the recipe for The Perfect Danish, so we may revisit this to see if we can figure out what happened. From the savory selections, I made the Biscuits and Gravy, although I used Impossible Sausage as I didn’t have time to make the homemade one it calls for. It was fine. What sings in this chapter and what will make me return to it, however, is the sweet stuff: Chocolate Hazelenut Crepes, Banana Chocolate Walnut Muffins? Yes, please.

From “Soups and Salads,” I made the Potato Leek Soup, which was simple, warm, and comforting. The Walnut Farro Salad felt healthy and hearty. I didn’t have any pomegranate seeds and without it, the dish lacked a little zing, but that’s what you get for not following instructions. This salad definitely forms a good tableau for an autumn/winter salad you can take in many directions.

I selected Farinata with Mozzarella and Romesco Sauce from the “Small Plates and Sides” section. Farinata is new to me – it’s sort of a chickpea pancake/pizza crust kind of thing, which is worth trying. This was flavorful and very filling.

The problem is, by the time I made the crust, the mozzerella, and the romesco sauce, this took me something like two hours, which is a long time for a small plate. This is the drawback of restaurant cookbooks I mentioned. For example, the recipe for Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup (1 hour, 45 minutes) not only requires you to make the soup but for the sandwich you have to make the romesco sauce (45 minutes ), the cheese sauce (20 minutes + overnight soaking) and the garlic butter (12 minutes). This can seem overwhelming and scare people away. Thus you need to remember that no one is scoring you on how closely you follow a recipe. If you don’t feel like making every element from scratch, don’t!

This book made me crave sweet more than savory, so I only made one of the entrees, the Trumpet Mushroom Scallops. I’ve seen a lot of recipes for mock scallops using these mushrooms and have been eager to try it. Oh boy. Yeah. Didn’t work for me. I don’t know what I did wrong, but the texture came out so springy and spongy and weird, I couldn’t eat them.

The herbed quinoa that went with it was just too salty. As usual, no way to know if the “scallops” didn’t work because of me or because of the recipe, but I doubt anyone would have put such an inedible dish in a cookbook, so… probably me. The saltiness was a problem for me in many of these recipes, but I think that must have been due to a difference in the “saltiness” of my kosher salt and theirs. If you get this cookbook, I’d recommend you start with less salt in everything and add as you go. That’s actually a pretty good rule of thumb for cooking anything.

Now the desserts. I first made the Butterscotch Pudding. The book says a customer at the restaurant described this as the “best thing [she’d] ever tasted.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it was good. The texture may have been a little odd, and the crumble on top was unnecessary and made the whole thing too sweet. But for those times when you just want butterscotch pudding – and let’s face it, there are those times – this works. The crowning glory of this chapter, though, is the Grand Marnier Ice Cream. Although I have made several attempts, I have never successfully made vegan ice cream. It all kind of freezes into a rock. Not this. You do it the traditional way, by making the custard, then turning it an ice cream maker. This ice cream is so flavorful and smooth, you will want to make it on the reg. When I was little and my mother had fancy dinner parties, she always made Mousse au Grand Marnier for dessert. It was so decadent and grown up, I looked forward to sneaking some every time. I have not yet been able to recreate it (gelatin), but this came so close, it almost brought a tear to my eye.

Overall, I would rate this book Vegan Intermediate. There are a number of somewhat obscure ingredients, and some of the recipes are complicated and time consuming. The creativity, however, and the number of new things you’ve never tried really make this book a standout which should be in your collection. Bonus: Moby donates all the profits from his restaurant to animal rights organizations. My next stop, the Banana Cream Pie…

Note: I did not receive any form of compensation in exchange for this review.