When Jayla Simms walked into Anchovy Book Co. on a hot Sunday afternoon this month, she felt like she stepped inside a friend’s kitchen.
Simms doesn’t consider herself a great cook, but after spending nearly a half-hour browsing through a curated selection of mostly hardcover cookbooks, she left with a vintage recipe book and motivation to spend more time cooking.
“Something about a cookbook, it just feels so homey and cozy,” Simms said. “Having a physical copy of a book makes [cooking] feel a little bit more slow and intentional, I think.”
At just 6 feet wide, the store on Cherokee Street is compact, like its namesake tin of fish, but it is thoughtfully packed with color and cookbooks. The specialty store opened last November and has been attracting novices and avid cooks alike who are seeking good bites.
Bookstores that exclusively sell cookbooks aren’t common. There are fewer than 20 in the country. Anchovy is the first one in the Midwest.
Beyond books, the shop is a place for people looking to connect with others around food.
“The vision for the store is to build community and to build community around cooking and spending time together,” said Stephanie McKinney, the store’s co-owner. “Spending time either cooking together or eating together is just really important.”
From a van to a permanent home
McKinney has been cooking up the idea of creating a cookbook store for almost a decade. Finding a place with low rent was a challenge, so she started with a mobile concept: a small Honda Acty van, affectionately nicknamed “Vanchovy.”
She filled it with vintage cookbooks and drove it around town to farmers markets and community events. Then, she said the perfect space went up for rent: a store with a “charming” half-address (2619 ½ Cherokee St.) in her Benton Park neighborhood.
With her best friend, Sara Johnson, she looked at the location last August. A few days later, the two celebrated their new store and got to sketching a business plan.
“I was very nervous about a very public failure,” Johnson said. “What if nobody comes and buys books? In a perfect world, we would have done years of market research. So I felt like, 'Oh no, are we a little bit crazy?'"
They each pitched in $5,000, and in two months while still working their full-time jobs, they secured licenses and permits and renovated the shop. When they opened their door in November, they said they were overwhelmed with support.
“I'm very surprised at how into cookbooks St. Louis is,” McKinney said.
Anchovy turned a profit in the first quarter, and the owners have built on the momentum through additional offerings, such as an online cookbook subscription, date nights at the shop and popular monthly dinner club meetings.
Anchovy also sells a few kitchen items such as aprons and tinned fish. That’s what drew Andrew O'Sullivan and Binh Doan into the store. The couple are part of a tinned fish club in their hometown of Memphis.
“Just seeing Anchovy in the name of the store, it’s just so cute and so fun,” O’Sullivan said.
The two sometimes cook and bake together, but Doan said when she chooses recipes on a cooking app, she often gets caught up on the ratings.
“With a cookbook, it kind of eliminates that. So you just have to take a chance, and it's kind of fun,” Doan said.
Comfort through cookbooks
Cookbooks are always a popular book category. Even through the proliferation of blogs and recipes on social media, demand for cookbooks has spiked in the past few years.
Cookbook sales grew 8% every year between 2010 and 2020, according to data from NPD BookScan.
That’s because they meet people’s need for comfort in a way most other genres don't, said Grace Hagen, the executive director of the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association.
“People are seeking ways to interact with others and have something to communicate around, to commune around, to find joy around,” Hagen said. “And so [Anchovy] is going to be thriving because it is meeting needs in all kinds of ways.”
Hagen, who is based in St. Louis, said she anticipates more cookbook stores will pop up around the country soon.
In addition to the often relaxing act of cooking for herself and loved ones, cookbooks are works of art, said Stephanie Co, a Benton Park resident and passionate home cook who occasionally fills in as cashier at Anchovy in exchange for store credit.
“I am excited about the beauty of having a cookbook in your hands, to be able to look through recipes,” Co said. “There's always a story behind it. You learn more about the author's culture and about their family stories, and then you also get to see a lot of really great visuals."
For Johnson, who grew up in a house where food was considered a utility and only later developed a love for cooking, a cookbook by Vivian Howard offered her comfort during a time of grief.
“My dad was sick with dementia for a long time, and towards the end of his life, there wasn't much we could do, and so I would just sit next to him and read that book cover to cover,” Johnson said. “It gave me a chance to kind of read about family and story and roots in a time when I was really, really reflective about that and thinking about my own heritage.”
Cookbook stores as third spaces
Each month, Anchovy hosts a Hot Dish meeting. It is part book club, part dinner party, and everyone brings a dish to share, made from the same cookbook.
New York Times bestselling author Justine Doiron’s cookbook, “Justine Cooks,” was the club’s featured book earlier this year. The St. Louis-area native has over 1 million followers on Instagram and started posting her recipes online several years before publishing a print book.
“A cookbook is always the tangible dream if you're a recipe developer, because it's something that people can have and hold with their hands,” Doiron said.
Doiron said the sustained interest in cookbooks and the rising fascination with specialty cookbook stores shows that people are craving spaces that cater to their love for cooking.
“Having spaces that are designed for people who love creating beautiful things with their hands, like with food — I think it is just going to gain more and more popularity, because not only is it a community, a third space where people with like-minded interests can meet, but it's also a fun concept to engage with people through food,” Doiron said.
Much of Doiron’s audience are supporters of indie bookstores and shopping locally. Hagen, who often coordinates between publishers and indie bookstores, said that makes for a golden combination: “raw economics that shopping locally adds for communities [and] the immeasurable and really important way that it brings humans together.”
