Andy Tullis / The BulletinBarrio chef and owner Steven Draheim displays his restaurant’s Jerked Pork Tacos with Grilled Pineapple Salsa.

If you like to eat, cook, read cookbooks, go out to restaurants or explore new food scenes when traveling, you won’t want to miss “Sizzle & Buzz: What’s Cookin’ in the Region’s Hottest Restaurants” (The Where to Eat Guide & Associates, Inc., 2013, $20).

It’s a new Pacific Northwest-focused paperback cookbook, featuring 14 of Bend’s restaurants, from the oldest — Pine Tavern — to some of the newest, like Spork, Barrio and Chow — with an interesting behind-the-scenes story about each establishment, plus a favorite recipe.

“Sizzle & Buzz” also spotlights top restaurants in Portland and Seattle.

In addition to being a fun read about 53 restaurants, 60 percent of each cookbook sale goes directly to organizations in each featured city that help feed people who are hungry. Here, the Hunger Prevention Coalition of Central Oregon is the beneficiary, so you get good recipes for a good cause with the purchase of this book.

The book’s roots

“Sizzle & Buzz” was the brainchild of Bend’s late John Herbik, founder and president of The Where to Eat Guide, a magazine found in multiple cities with information about local restaurants.

In the cookbook’s introduction, Herbik writes about growing up as a hungry kid in Cleveland, Ohio, in a family on welfare.

He describes being moved by seeing the 2012 documentary, “A Place at the Table,” which is about hunger in America. He knew hunger, and wanted to help. Since he worked with food professionals in his company, Herbik created “Sizzle & Buzz” to showcase great restaurants in the Northwest with a collection of some of their best recipes. The icing on the cake for Herbik was the portion of sales that would benefit hunger charities.

“This was a project John thought about for a long time. He wanted to give money to the Hunger Prevention Coalition, and was committed to increasing the nutritional value of the food they provide, ” said Sarah Daily, the cookbook’s writer who lives in Bend.

Daily is proud to be part of the “Sizzle & Buzz” crew. She told us she had a great time interviewing all of the chefs and restaurant owners in the book.

“I was struck by how hard all of these owners and chefs work. It was really inspiring to me. A lot of them have families and other commitments outside of work, and yet they’re so passionate about their food. I wanted to tell the more personal stories as well as the food stories,” Daily said.

We picked three of the restaurants featured in the cookbook to share their recipes below: The Pine Tavern’s Dungeness Crab Cakes, Barrio’s Jerked Pork Tacos with Grilled Pineapple Salsa, and Cafe Sintra’s Portuguese Stew.