We’re ecstatic to get more face-time with Campanile’s owner and exec chef Mark Peel, who recently dished out judgment with the Top Chef crew in Vegas and was dangled as a dinner-date prize for Hell’s Kitchen competitors. While we’re dying to know what Top Chef’s super-group of French chefs got cooking last week in Sin City once they put family-man Tom Colicchio to bed, we’ll first get a taste of Peel’s passions in New Classic Family Dinners, his cookbook coming in early October. The tome hand-picks Peel’s favorite recipes from Campanile’s Monday night “Family Dinner” pre-fixes, which have mostly focused on gussied-up elements in comfort food, like wild mushroom mac ‘n cheese, lobster pie, or monkfish osso bucco. The book will have over 200 recipes drawn from the Monday dinners, as well as a section on preparing rabbit.
