Vegan Italian Food By Shannon Martinez

Shannon Martinez is a rockstar, and her latest book proves it. An opulent ode to Italian cooking, Vegan Italian Food is a future classic in the making.

A tour de force in vegetarian and vegan cooking, Shannon has been a chef in Melbourne kitchens for over 25 years. She is best known as the owner of Australia’s most prolific (and hatted) plant-based business, Smith & Daughters and the wildly popular Smith & Deli. When she isn’t running her businesses or writing successful cookbooks, Shannon sometimes cooks for celebrity vegans (she’s cooked privately for Kourtney Kardashian, Travis Barker, Billie Eilish, Cyndi Lauper and more). Some of her most popular dishes are twists on Italian classics – indulgent lasagnes and moreish focaccias.

Shannon’s latest cookbook, Vegan Italian Food, is like a decadent, grungy house party, full of plates piled high and models eating granita by the pool. Most of all, it’s a joyous celebration of Italian peasant cooking – what Shannon calls “vegan food in its purest form”. These are recipes that Shannon loves to eat: “dried beans, pulses and legumes cooked to a pulp, infused with aromatics and wiped up with soft, crusty bread” as well as “bitter leaves braised to within an inch of their lives in healthy glugs of olive oil”.

While a lot of the recipes are traditional in nature, there are some vegan twists to suit fans of Smith & Daughters. There are plant-based versions of salami, meatballs and cacio e pepe, to name a few. Vegan Italian Food is like no other cookbook – a perfect fusion of decadence and affordability, of well-crafted recipes paired with stunning photography. Readers will want to step through the page and join the house party.

About the author

Shannon Martinez has been a chef in Melbourne kitchens for over 25 years and is the owner of Australia’s most prolific plant-based business, Smith & Daughters. She has written the best-selling books Smith & Daughters: A Cookbook (That Happens to be Vegan), Smith & DELIcious: Food From Our Deli (That Happens to be Vegan), and Vegan With Bite.

Smith & Daughters is the first plant-based restaurant in Melbourne to earn a hat from the Age Good Food Awards and in 2023, Shannon won the Restaurant Personality of the Year award from Gourmet Traveller. Shannon has appeared as a guest chef on Masterchef and My Kitchen Rules, and works with numerous brands worldwide, including as a brand ambassador for the Body Shop, V2 and Alternative Meat Co.

In between running the Smith & Daughters empire, garnering awards and writing successful cookbooks, Shannon has also found time to craft a mouthwatering menu at Lona Misa in South Yarra as the executive chef. In 2024, she will also be adding a vegan eatery at Marvel Stadium to her portfolio, perhaps the first of its kind.

While Shannon herself eats meat, she has perfected her vegan repertoire and says this is what makes her food taste so good; she aims to replicate the flavours and textures of meat, rather than serving bland, predictable, vegan fare.

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