Wow, I enjoyed this way more than I expected! On more than one occasion I ate lunch in my car so I could keep listening. Hilarious, insightful, and mouth-watering. Buford's taste in food is just a bit different from mine - I can't count the pounds of "lardo" that he consumes over the telling - but his journey feels very kindred. Amateur cook learns skills, travels to Italy, appreciates homemade traditional food. Except he happens to be completely obsessive and surrounded by larger than life characters and a writer by profession.

I loved all of the elements that Buford wove together, but the only reason the book doesn't make the 5 star cut is that it did feel completely schizophrenic at times, like he couldn't decide if he was writing a memoir, a biography of Mario Batali, or a history of Italian Renaissance cooking. It jumps back and forth thematically and chronologically, so you just kind of have to give up trying to follow along and take from it what you will.

Piles of bonus points for a book about meat with the utmost respect for the animals. He even writes that he appreciates vegetarians because they are among the few people who actually THINK about meat.

Also, I get cranky when I read too much about locavores and the green revolution and won't someone pleeease think of the children blah blah blah. So much better when someone recognizes traditional food as this powerfully conservative force. He has a beautiful passage about how the essence of what he has learned comes down to handmade. Indulge me in an extensive quote...

"Italians have a word, casalinga, homemade, although its primary sense is "made by hand." My theory is just a variant of casalinga. (Small food: by hand and therefore precious, hard to find. Big food: from a factory and therefore cheap, abundant.) Just about every preparation I learned in Italy was handmade and involved my learning how to use my own hands differently. My hands were trained to roll out dough, to use a knife to break down a thigh, to make sausage or lardo or polpetone. With some techniques, I had to make my hands small, like Betta's. With others, I made them big, like the Maestro's. The hands, Dario says, are everything. With them, cooks express themselves, like artists. With them, they make food that people use their hands to eat. With the hands, Dario passes on to me what he learned from his father. With the hands, Betta gives me her aunts. The hands of Miriam's mother, her grandmothers. The hands of Dario's grandfather, the great-grandfather he never met, except indirectly, in what was passed on through his hands.

Miriam, who can't get a pastina to roll out the dough, no longer makes handmade pasta. When her daughter takes over, will she roll it out by hand? In Tuscany, you can't get the meat at the heart of the region's cooking, so Dario and the Maestro found a small farm that reproduces the intensity of flavor they grew up with. How long will that taste memory last? The Maestro will die. Dario will die. I will die. The memory will die. Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season."

It is not often that a book brings out the worst in me. Reading, after all, is often an opportunity to tap into the better aspects of one's character that otherwise go unexercised in the daily life of an office worker--but this book put me in an ill-temper every time I attempted to finish it. (And I note that it seems as though many, many Goodreads folks also had difficulty finishing it, though for different reasons.) I finally realized that I'm too jealous over Buford's opportunities to enjoy the telling: Eating lunch--apparently many times--with Marco Pierre White? Traveling for months on end in Italy? Who is this guy? Why can he afford to do that? Why did he get to apprentice at Babbo?? (And I actually know qualified people who have tried and failed to land that very gig. For lack of connections? Lack of pedigree? Unclear. But certainly unmeritocratic, for Buford showed up not knowing a damn thing about a professional kitchen. Or, apparently, prep work: The episodes with the ducks and later the carrots made me apoplectic.)

In that sense, it's poor writing, for we fail to learn the most basic mechanics of the tale--how did he get from point A to B?: Was he taken on because he is such a remarkable human being? Or was it just a matter of "he's a writer" so it opened doors? (But, gee, I know a lot of writers who would enjoy walking through such doors, so that can't be it, either.) Buford's tales only underscore the highly elite nature of the food world--despite the many claims to the contrary. Even, and ironically, despite Buford's pretentious obsession with peasant food and "the old ways."
The recent New Yorker article (summer 2013) on Buford in the kitchen in Daniel Boulud was a terrific bit of culinary detective work. But it again raised for me the question, why him? Why not me?

It doesn't say so on the cover, but this book is about Batali and the author's sycophancy toward him. While I was initially interested to hear the author's experiences in professional kitchens, Batali gave me the creeps even before #metoo. Perhaps this isn't a fair evaluation of the author and the book, but I was unable to get through more than 30 pages. There are too many other things to read (and cook!).

I have to admit I picked this up because Anthony Bourdain was reading it on his show "No Reservations" (and he wrote Kitchen Confidential). This is the story of an editor for the New Yorker who ends up in the kitchens of Mario Batali - it is an encounter of his experiences in the kitchen, plus a biography of Mario, plus a history of food - all at the same time. I really enjoyed this. It took me back to my restaurant days, expressing the outrageous kitchen culture that you would not believe if you hadn't experienced it too. Following are quotations that were meaningful to me (I'm not sure they make sense out of context).


"Holly was offered a job. It paid five hundred dollars a week, with five days' vacation starting in her second year. There was no mention of sick pay because it was understood you didn't get sick, which I'd already discovered in the chilly silence that had greeted me when I'd come down with the flu and phoned Elisa to say that I wasn't coming in that day...."

"In fact, without my fully realizing it, there was an education in the frenzy, because in hte frenzy there was always repetition. Over and over again, I'd pick up a smell, as a task was being completed, until finally I came to identify not only what the food was but where it was in its preparation... One day I was given a hundred and fifty lamb tongues. I had never held a lamb's tongue, which I found greasy and unnervingly humanlike. But after cooking, trimming, peeling, and slicing a hundred and fifty lam tognues, I was an expert."

"Give a chef an egg, and you'll know what kind of cook he is. It takes a lot to cook an egg." (This just made me laugh because in my restaurant kitchen, the CIA-trained grill cook could not poach an egg to save his life, and actually destroyed an entire dozen one day before the chef asked me to do it, and I only knew how because I'd read about it)

"In addition to the endless riffing about cooking-with-love, chefs also talk about the happiness of making food: not preparing or cooking food but making it." (passage goes on in detail about the satisfaction of the aesthetic pleasure as well as other people finding satisfaction in what you have made)

"The yelling, too, was not without its life lessons. When Frankie was abusing me, he was always doing it for a reason. He was trying to make me a better cook."

There are so many more I could quote but they are too long - one page describes this day in a Florentine kitchen where the author trips, splits his head open, and catches on fire, and it is so freaking hilarious. I highly recommend this book.

This book took me a shockingly long time to finish, something about reading on a Kindle that hides a book’s potential density. But within this density I found what amounted to a GoPro camera on the author’s head as he journeys into fine dining and the history of Italian cuisine. There is no fat or puffery in Buford’s writing, just pure lived experience, which is an incredibly overlooked and undervalued resource in 2024. I would never hesitate to pick up anything with his name on it.

Second time reading this and first time via audiobook . I’ve enjoyed this book very much. It’s interesting how my feelings changed - the stories about men in the kitchen, and how they treated women - the first time I read it, I was somewhat shocked but the second time through it screamed at me, how wrong things used to be. Time changes everything. The book is well written, very interesting, and gave me a great insight into the heart of a professional kitchen, and so much more.

While an interesting insight into restaurant culture, I found this book to be not just outdated but also grating. The writing itself is average. The story seems to jump around quite a bit. The best part about it is the access the writer had to “real” NYC/Italian kitchens 15 or so years ago. But it is shocking to me how accepting the author is of blatant sexism and racism, at best covering up the offensive way women and minorities were treated in the kitchen, and at worst participating in this treatment.

Есть такой анекдот: мужик заполняет документы на эмиграцию в Санта-Барбару. Его спрашивают - "почему именно туда?" - "а я там всех знаю!"
Food related non-fiction - мое серьёзное книжное увлечение последних лет. И в Heat я словила такое приятное чувство - вот упоминается Калифорнийская кулинарная революция, которая началась в ресторане, где тусовалась Рут Рейхл, чьи книги я читала. Вот упоминание знаменитых ресторанных обзоров Нью-Йорк Таймс, которые могут повара как погубить, так и возвысить - Рут Рейхл, собственно, их и писала. Рассказывается про "кухню" кулинарных телешоу - это уже Гейл Симмонс, а она была ассистенткой уважаемого критика из "Вог", Джеффри Стейнгартен, чьи остроумные заметки о еде я с таким удовольствием читала. Одна тусовка!
Если вернуться к Heat - это книга бывшего редактора "Нью-Йоркера", который серьезно повернулся на кулинарии и провел год с лишним на кухне знаменитого Манхэттенского ресторана Babbo. Параллельно он учится премудростям изготовления пасты в Италии, работает в Тоскане у "лучшего в мире мясника", читает старинные книги рецептов. Сама "кухня" кухни - амбиции поваров, тонкости иерархии, особенности техники - мне понравилась немного больше, чем поиски кулинарной души Италии, но в целом все ��чень круто - динамично, остроумно и интересно. На голодный желудок не рекомендую)

Very enjoyable book. Best part are the insights into how a professional kitchen is run and what it takes to work in one. If you ever wondered about what that's like read this book. I also greatly enjoyed the part where he works for Dario Cecchini, especially after having been there myself and having met the man.

Lesser points: I thought the part where he learns how to make pasta is kinda thin, but maybe not unexpected since he only spent a few weeks in italy to learn it. Also as someone who's not American and has never watched the food network or heard of Mario Batali, the first part of the book was a bit too much focussed on praising this celebrity. But thankfully the focus shifts after a couple of chapters.

Kitchen culture from the inside. Interesting re-read in light of the updated history of Mario Batali who plays such a prominent role in this book that was written before me-too.

I liked this memoir, but didn't love it. The first half pulled me right in with tales of Mario Batali and his excesses, bizarre behavior and volatile temperament. He's definitely not in real life what you see on Molto Mario! I used to think I'd like to work with him but now, I'm not so sure. Being an old restaurant head from way back as well as Italian, the history of food and culture of Italy were quite interesting in the beginning, but got to be a little much after the second half of the book started, and I found myself skimming to get back to the story, which started to really lag. There were so many colorful people in this book, some absolutely hilarious and others rather intimidating that I wanted to like it more than I ultimately did. But I got lost the last third of the book and my brain started to glaze over. I finished it because I had come too far to bail, but you could definitely see a tone change from the first half. I wish the author had been more consistent with his presentation (see what I did there, restaurant heads?) but overall there was enough...just barely....to merit 3 stars. Ruth Reichl, you're still my favorite.

This book really helped me to appreciate the restaurant industry and Italian culinary history and culture. Things I learned: 1. Mario Batali is a disgusting man. 2. Restaurant work is rough. 3. Italians are awesome. 4. Pork is gross.