Abraham Salum has been cooking in Dallas for more than twenty years, and the room at Salum Restaurant on Cole Avenue still fills up the way it did when he opened in 2005. That kind of staying power doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the food is consistently excellent, the menu changes every single month — never repeated in two decades — and the chef himself is the kind of person who makes a dining room feel like somewhere you belong.
Now he has a cookbook, and it is exactly what you would expect from someone who has spent a lifetime cooking from memory, instinct, and a very particular set of roots.
A Spoonful of Everywhere: An Immigrant Chef’s Journey Through Global Cuisine — co-written with James Beard Award-winning culinary author James O. Fraioli — is 75 recipes built around the life Salum has lived. Born in Mexico City to a family with Lebanese, Italian, and Spanish heritage, he trained at the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, then spent formative years cooking in France and Belgium before returning to Mexico and eventually landing in Dallas. That path shows up on every page. The recipes are organized by ingredient — cheese, fruit, greens and vegetables, pastas and risottos, seafood, fowl, sweets — which sounds simple until you realize how much ground it covers.
The Lilia’s Yukon Gold Potato and Onion Tortilla Española is in there, named for someone who mattered. So are Provençal classics, modern global plates, and signature dishes from Salum Restaurant that regulars will recognize immediately.
The book is personal in a way that cookbooks from restaurant chefs often aren’t. Salum’s background — Mexican by birth, European by training, Lebanese and Italian and Spanish by ancestry — gives the recipes a range that holds together because it’s all genuinely his. There’s no theme being imposed from the outside. This is just what happens when you ask a man who has cooked in four countries across three decades to write down what he actually makes.
Dean Fearing, who has known Salum as a peer and colleague for years, called it “a passport to global flavor, brought to life with warmth, authenticity, and culinary mastery.” Lee Cullen of the Dallas Morning News said readers will be “enchanted and craving more.” Booklist described it as “polished and playful” and noted the Lebanese, Italian, Mexican, and Spanish influences woven through every chapter. Those are not exaggerations.
Salum Restaurant, for anyone who hasn’t been, is at 4152 Cole Avenue, Suite 103 — on the corner of Cole and Fitzhugh, convenient to Uptown, Highland Park, and Oak Lawn. It’s casual fine dining in the truest sense: the room is warm and unhurried, the staff has been there for years, and the food takes its time. Lunch runs Monday through Friday 11:30am to 2:30pm. Dinner is Monday through Saturday 6 to 10:30pm. Free valet on weekends. Reservations on OpenTable. Phone is (214) 252-9604.
A Spoonful of Everywhere is available now on Amazon and wherever cookbooks are sold. It belongs on the shelf next to the good ones.
