Longtime food writer and Chestnut Hill resident Sam Gugino has released a new cookbook titled, “Eat! You’ll Get Hungry — A Family Food Saga.” While this is Gugino’s fifth cookbook, it’s different from the others. This one is a combination cookbook and memoir.

“It basically talks about my growing up in the ’50s and ’60s in Buffalo, New York,” Gugino said, “and my experiences with my extended family and the kinds of foods we ate, and the traditions we had” as Italian Americans.

But according to Gugino, the book can be enjoyed by people of all ethnic backgrounds.

“I think a lot of people who grew up in ethnic families, like Jewish and Polish families, will recognize a lot of the traditions and interactions I talk about in the book,” he said.

After graduating from the Restaurant School in Philadelphia in 1976, Gugino was a chef and manager for two critically-acclaimed restaurants in the city, Vincenzo’s and Avanti. In 1986, Gugino made the transition to food writing, becoming a restaurant critic at the Philadelphia Daily News. From there, Gugino had multiple stops along his career, writing about food for multiple publications.

The transition from cooking to writing was a major self-discovery moment for Gugino.

“In the late ’70s, I started to write, and I took some writing classes with a guy named Art Milner,” he said. “And Art said to me, ‘You’ve got something here, and you should concentrate on food, family, and humor, because that’s the stuff you’re good at.’”

While Gugino was experienced in writing books, sitting down to create “Eat! You’ll Get Hungry” required a different kind of writing process. The book has been a work in progress since the 1980s. When Gugino started writing it, his agent tried to “shop it around,” Gugino said. “But the feedback was that people aren’t interested in a memoir about somebody they’ve never heard of, which is, of course, ridiculous.”

The book was then put on the shelf collecting dust for a number of years until the early 2000s, when Gugino picked it back up. By then, his agent was met with “Too many memoirs” responses from potential publishers. So the book project was put back on the shelf one last time, until the COVID-19 pandemic. The months of isolation gave Gugino a lot of time to add to the book and polish it until its eventual release in 2025.

When Gugino isn’t writing or cooking, residents can find him acting in local theater. He’s been in productions at nearby venues since 2017 and finished his 21st play in March.