Caribbean Cocktails
A first cookbook for Penguin Random House’s cookbook imprint: forty drinks, twenty bites, and one look that holds from the first frame to the printed page.
The brief
Nelson German runs alaMar and Sobre Mesa in Oakland, two kitchens already in the Lemonad portfolio, and Meski in San Francisco. When Ten Speed Press signed his first book, drinks and bites from the Afro-Latino diaspora, the shot list arrived with a publisher’s expectation: every recipe consistent, every prop in the same world, nothing that reads like a one-off.
How the shoot ran
Book work is repetition management. The look was locked up front, surfaces, palette, and light logic, then the shot list ran in blocks: drinks in one pass, plates in another, portraits and set moments between. That is how frame sixty still matches frame one when the pages sit side by side.
The author on set · Ten Speed Press
Mojito on broken tile · Ten Speed Press
Mama Juana still life · Ten Speed Press
Hibiscus old fashioned · Ten Speed Press
The drinks
Dried-citrus platter · Ten Speed Press
The punch bowl spread · Ten Speed Press
Cocktail over the fruit basket · Ten Speed Press
Stuffed peppers on teal · Ten Speed Press
The plates, and the table
Where it landed
Published June 2, 2026. A hundred and seventy-six pages, hardcover, Ten Speed Press. It went onto the publisher’s bestseller list, and both Booklist and Publishers Weekly reviewed it — the trade press noticing a debut cookbook is not a given.
The frames on this page are from the delivered set. They’re also in the book, which is the only test that counts.
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