'Under the Apron: A Chef's Unsystematic Guide with Recipes and Tattoo Sketches' is a compendium of Shishkin's (co-founder and culinary visionary at the Moscow restaurant Delicatessen) knowledge and ideas about the life of a chef, what a restaurant looks like from the outside and inside: what delicious food is and how to invent it, how to handle knives and stoves, how many ingredients should be on a plate, and how to plan the economy of your establishment to avoid bankruptcy.

The reader will have to decide for themselves whether 'Under the Apron' is fiction masquerading as a cookbook or an expansion of the gastronomic arena through lofty style and philosophical reasoning.