Finding art on a plate in Shanghai

A lush new coffee-table volume celebrates an expat's love for her adopted home and the food she came to love there, Mike Peters reports.

Piper Stremmel will be the first to tell you that she's not a food writer. Her background is arts, and that was her beat as a freelance writer for the two-plus years that she lived in Shanghai.

But ask her where she and her boyfriend most liked to eat, and it's suddenly clear how this young dynamo came to produce Shanghai Chefs: A Cookbook, a 270-page coffee-table book that was published late last year.