The Chefs and Cooks issue, the third installment of Lucky Peach, attempts to answer a few pressing questions: What does it mean to be a cook in today’s age of celebrity chefdom? Where is cooking headed? How did the molten chocolate cake make its way from Michel Bras’s restaurant in Laguiole, France to the Wal-Mart freezer case? What happens, exactly, when bartenders spank mint? The answers arrive from all over the place Mario Batali recalls the early days of Food Network; Meredith Erickson spends an afternoon with Fergus Henderson; Naomi Duguid visits street vendors in Chiang Mai. We talk to cooks from Fort Bragg to Paris to the South Pole. There are recipes for barbecue-chicken pizza and pasta primavera, and Christina Tosi’s upside-down pineapple cake, just in time for Mother’s Day.

Lucky Peach is a journal of food writing, published on a quarterly basis by McSweeney’s. It is a creation of David Chang, the James Beard Award–winning chef behind the Momofuku restaurants in New York, Momofuku cookbook cowriter Peter Meehan, and Zero Point Zero Production—producers of the Travel Channel’s Emmy Award–winning Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.