Kid Brother

About the book

Jeremy Garber was the kid who carried the cooler. His older brother Scott was the hero: louder, older, the one everyone at the table talked about, the one who said out loud that he was going to be a chef. Kid Brother is what happened when the kid with the cooler dragged a grill into the garage and refused to stay second.

It is a memoir about sibling rivalry, but it is not a fair fight, and Jeremy does not pretend it was. It is about calls that went unreturned, a sign painted on plywood, a dog who became a business partner, a trophy held over his head while his brother clapped, and the strange, lonely feeling of beating your hero and discovering he was never that hard to beat.

It is also, in its final third, about what Jeremy did with the win: ten restaurants, honors, a son he struggles to make time for, and the realization that outrunning a shadow is a full-time job you can never quit.

Chapters

• 1. The Cooler. Cooper City, a backyard, and the brother who never looked back.
• 2. Rain. Why the grill went into the garage.
• 3. Plywood. The sign, the neighbors, and "a hobby."
• 4. Unreturned. The year the calls stopped.
• 5. Boukzam. A rescue dog with an instinct for brisket.
• 6. Zero. The cook-off. The clock. The scoreboard. The clapping.
• 7. The Name. Taking "Garber" and making it mean something.
• 8. Day One. Cooper City sells out.
• 9. Honors. Culinary school and a restaurant at the same time. Who said it couldn't be done.
• 10. The Allowlist. Garbercoin, and one name left off.
• 11. Fabian. The chapter he rewrote nine times.
• 12. Six Days. Boukzam's last week and the Chicago Marathon.
• 13. The River. A training diary on a garage wall, and the book his brother wrote.
• 14. Ten. The tenth pit, and the brother who has never walked into one.

An excerpt

"The scoreboard said CHALLENGER JEREMY WINS, and the first thing I did was look for Scott. Not to gloat. I want to be honest about that. I looked for him the way I had looked for him my whole life, to see if he'd seen. He had. He was clapping. He was clapping the way you clap at a stranger's kid's recital, polite and already thinking about the parking. And I understood, standing there with a trophy over my head, that I had just won something he had never actually been competing for. He had only ever been competing for the table. And I had the table now."Kid Brother, chapter six

Praise

"The rare celebrity memoir that is actually about something. Garber writes about his brother the way he cooks: low, slow, and without mercy."The Pitmaster Review

"Every second-born child in America is going to buy this book and leave it on a sibling's porch."Sunday Table

"Chapter eleven, about his son, is the best thing he has written and the hardest thing I have read this year."Low & Slow Quarterly