Two upcoming books look behind the scenes in restaurants. Rather than providing the recipes that have made chefs famous, they provide the recipes that feed restaurant staffs at their own pre-service meals day in and day out.

In April 2013, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish Family Table: Favorite Staff Meals from Our Restaurants to Your Home by Michael Romano, executive director of New York’s Union Square Restaurant Group, and Karen Stabiner. Senior executive editor Rux Martin says the book features “not typical chef cooking (which is trending down), but meals that are made under the same constraints that we home cooks work under: prepared on the fly, with budgetary constraints, and with ordinary ingredients. The one difference? These dishes have to please the palates of the best chefs in the nation.”

Running Press will publish Come In, We’re Closed by Christine Carroll and Jody Eddy in September. The $35 hardcover features staff meals from 25 high-end restaurants, including the Fat Duck in England and wd-50 in New York. At Philadelphia’s Morimoto, the staff feasts on crispy octopus suckers and Japanese beef curry, while the workers at Montreal’s Au Pied du Cochon fuel up on mushroom, onion, and scallion pizza and creamy smoked sturgeon pappardelle.