Extra Sauce

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 loves of Zahra’s life, the people and 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.

As she reflects on life in all its delicious, messy, heartbreaking glory, Zahra reckons with the adrenaline-filled highs and devasting lows of opening cult-favorite Brooklyn restaurant Brucie, and then closing it at the height of its popularity. She writes about cooking her father his last meal and the unexpected yet beautiful things she found at the bottom of her grief after he died. She also explores the relationships she couldn’t save through cooking, like her fractured family of origin and the lover she had to leave in Tuscany. Finally, she writes about the immense courage it takes to allow ourselves to be loved, extra sauce and all.

Told with both 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.

Author Biography

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 also 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 Zine, and Epicurious.