The Spinning Plate:
Essays and Recipes from
the Kitchen of Angela Mears
For over a decade, Angela Mears wrote about food — not as performance, but as a way of living. Late-night reflections. Family recipes passed down from her mother Mamie. The kind of honest cooking that doesn’t care if it photographs well.
We’re launching this book for Lunar New Year — a holiday Angela loved, and one that runs through the book like a thread. Her mother’s zongzi. New Year’s hot pot. The idea that food can create a “piece of home” no matter where you are.
Read more about why the Spinning Plate is more than a cookbook.
Donation Tiers:
The Spinning Plate – Digital Edition — $38. Receive a downloadable PDF of the book. Link included in your thank-you email.
The Spinning Plate – Hardcover — $88. Receive a hardcover copy of the book. In Chinese culture, 8 is the luckiest number — it sounds like the word for prosperity.
The Spinning Plate – Legendary Hardcover — $168. Receive a hardcover copy with a handwritten note, plus your name listed as a Founding Supporter on our website.
Where Your Donation Goes
Every dollar supports the Next Dragon Program — grants and mentorship for aspiring creatives who face financial barriers to entering creative careers. The program enables under-resourced students to accept the low- and no-pay internships that serve as gateways to careers in advertising, film, music, fashion, and other creative fields.
More than a Cookbook
For twelve years, Angela Mears wrote about food. Not the kind that looks perfect on a plate, but the kind that tells a story. Late-night reflections from a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago. Her mother Mamie’s recipes from China, carried across an ocean and simmered into a new life in Los Angeles. The meals Angela turned to when she was homesick, heartbroken, or simply hungry.
The Spinning Plate collects those essays and recipes into a single volume. It’s a culinary memoir that bridges Angela’s professional life as a creative leader — she became the youngest Chief Creative Officer at Weber Shandwick New York — with her private passion for soulful, honest cooking. The kind she called “un-fucked-around-with.”
The book follows Angela across cities and seasons: the suburbs of Los Angeles, her university years in Chicago, holidays with her mother Mamie, and the quiet rituals that held her life together. Through dishes like Pork Belly Zongzi, New Year’s hot pot, and the fig salad she couldn’t stop making, Angela wrote about what food actually does — it connects us. Across distance, across generations, across loss.
Many of the book’s most powerful recipes come from Angela’s mother, Mamie, who came to Los Angeles from China. Her kitchen was a place of “joy and remedy” — where zongzi carried “two thousand years of culture in every bite,” where Hong Shao Rou simmered until the meat fell apart, and where food communicated what words couldn’t.