Obsession doesn't translate easily. Some people are lucky to find one thing to devote their entire attention to and be rewarded in its modicum, obscure though it may seem to others. A good writer excels in conjoining two obsessions, I feel. Love of language/communication and another thing. For the author here, the other thing is the genesis of food. The rapturous moment, in case of the metamorphosis of ingredient into food, comes only with an understanding of the cooks intent and it's successful effect.

Few people would have been able to devote the amount of obsession that Mr Buford does, and fewer still would be able to transpose the same curiosity and obsession onto the reader.

He alludes to his ability to shake off haute cuisines toxicities as coming from him being a tourist in this life. I believe it comes from having a surety of life independent of the business and on his character. Whats telling for me, is that toxic environments are created by people with big stakes and an inability to articulate their dependence on other people in failure and in success. Certainly in their orbits are people under similar stresses exhibiting none of the toxic behavior.

Principally, we look at Mario Batali and Dario Ceccini. In the journey we meet a lot more people in their orbits and the digressions are well structured and add to the book as a whole. It is tempting to use food imagery. Everything is well proportioned.

Some thoughts - certainly the obsession of food, the making of it and seeking perfection in the same is presented well. And this is something that propels near everyone we meet. They all teach the author respect for the ingredient and the process. I like that the people who are able to teach most are people who exhibit none of the callous machismo, sexism, anger and bravado. I like that the author presents these unflattering sides of people to us. A lesser book might have ignored this in favor of reveling in the insider status afforded.

The books structure in essence is - I was curious about this food, I found this person making this food, I learned from them about this food. In each step we make a small detour in description. And this somehow transposes the authors curiosity to us. No mean feat.

Let me preface this review with a disclaimer, I am not a foodie; I am an eater. My only interest in food typically is how it tastes, not its journey from field to slaughterhouse to restaurant to the particulars of preparation to my plate to my stomach, but Buford might have changed my perspective. His literary-historical perspective on Tuscan food, his wild, uproarious tales from the life of Mario Batali and the Babbo kitchen, and his engaging portraits of food culture in Italia, were thoroughly enjoyable and a most entertaining read. The only quibbles I have are the barely mentioned supporting cast of his family that was also involved in his big, culinary tour of la dolce vita. While I have always fantasized about marrying a man who would suggest that I quit academia to move to Italy and live on pancetta and love, I think it must have been horrifying for his wife to hear that her husband was abandoning the relative stability and paycheck of his job as fiction editor for *The New Yorker* to spend time screwing around in Mario Batali's kitchen and then the restaurants and butcheries of Tuscany trying to sate his gluttinous muse. Buford's acknowledgment at the beginning of the book hardly seems a fittingly sufficient tribute to the amount of dedication and forbearance displayed by such a spouse. Nonetheless, this was obvi. a Perrin pick, and she was right-on in thinking it would be just the fantasy food tour of Italy my graduate-education-weary soul needed at the moment.

I was so looking forward to reading this book, but in the end it took me forever to finish reading it. I did not realize that his only other book is the excellent "Among the Thugs" (he is the editor of Granta.

I mean, Buford, Batali, and (at the very end for a bit) Bruni. I guess the problem is that everyone else in the book is doing this for a living - to pay the bills. Buford is, in the end, a 'tourist" to the F&B world, and he does not seem to realize that.

Good stories within the book about various lesser knowns in the world of finer dining. Good book, just not as good as I was looking forward to. In the end I just kept on thinking, "No, no - you *are* and outsider!"

Nicht nur ein wunderbare Geschichte einer Person, die sich selbst neu erfindet, sondern und vor allem eine Liebesgeschichte gewidmet der italienischen Küche. Da läuft ein amerikanischer Quereinsteiger durch die tollsten, originellsten und originalsten Küchen des Stiefels und kocht und beobachtet und probiert, dass einem beim lesen das Wasser im Mund zusammen läuft. Und nebenbei lernt man mit dem „Peposo al notturno“ eines der leckersten Rezepte der Cuccina della Mamma kennen. Seitdem bei Einladungen nicht mehr ohne

Bill Buford delivers an engrossing tale of food obsession, restaurants and the eccentric people who run them in this fabulous food memoir. It is pretty evenly divided between Buford's adventures working in the kitchen of Mario Batali's famed restaurant Babbo, and his subsequent apprenticeships learning pasta making and butchery in Italy.

I felt the beginning to be a bit disjointed and jumpy (wait, where is he? why is he doing this?) and a few too many assumptions being made at first that I already knew about things like Mario Batali's career arc. Nevertheless as it continues, the narrative coheres and begins to carry the reader along with it.

Spoiler alert- sort of- My favorite revelation comes toward the end of the book when Buford puts forth a theory on food that I thought was kind of brilliant: that the problem with food today might not be a division between "slow" and "fast" food, as we've heard so much about, but rather one between big and small... big food means industrial food= bad. Small food means local and lovingly prepared= good. If this "Aha!" moment were the only thing I got out of the entire book it would've been well worth the read, but Buford is far too entertaining for that to be the case. Highly recommend.

A re-read, but still so good. I loved reading about Buford’s cooking adventures and struggles.
But I was much more aware and disturbed by the kitchen sexism this time around.

Gives credence to the idea that stepping outside of your comfort zone is a great way to write a book. Buford also succeeded in making me reconsider being a vegetarian. This questioning passed soon after reading Heat, but if I ever travel to Tuscany you better believe I'm visiting that butcher's shop.

If you take any interest in cooking, highly recommend

Some of this book is amazing, but I found it uneven as a whole. I picked it up because I was curious about Mario Batali, but the Batali of this book is the least interesting character of all. The final chapters, when Bill Buford goes to Italy to apprentice with a butcher, are absolutely gorgeous.
Bill Buford was an editor at the New Yorker and his breath of knowledge shows. He is best when discussing Italy, everything from the making of tortellini (and the rumor that they are modeled after the pasta originator's lover's belly button), the history of Italian cooking, and his research of fourteenth century cookbooks. He writes wonderfully and has a great sense of humor and humility (which explains how he managed to work for an entire year, without pay and under constant abuse, at Batali's restaurant). At times he just tells too much and needed another editor (or butcher) looking over his shoulder and telling him to cut the fat off.

WOW What goes on in a comercial kitchen! A fun read that hooked me like a thriller. Makes me hunger for tortellini with goat cheese dusted with fennel pollen.

I had a lot of fun with this. A good exploration of food and cooking. It probably could have been trimmed down quite a bit, but I won't hold that against it.

The author, the fiction editor of The New Yorker, quits his job in order to pursue a dream. More of a challenge, really. Could he, through apprenticeship and training, become a professional cook? Due to his work, he had already met and eaten with larger than life Food Network star Mario Batali. Given the chance to work as a "slave" in Batali’s three-star New York restaurant, Babbo, Buford goes for it. But his culinary adventures don't end in the kitchen; in a whirlwind of almost obsessed searching, he travels to England and Italy, following in the footsteps of the chefs who came before and trained Batali. He is instructed in the preparation of game by famed chef Marco Pierre White, he meets an ancient Italian grandmother who still makes pasta the traditional way by hand, he discusses how to make the finest olive oil with olive growers who pride themselves on insanely exacting standards, and he works for a while in the shop of Italy's most famous (and probably most eccentric) butcher.

Ever frank about his progress, Buford describes the many errors he makes in Babbo's kitchen under the contemptuous eyes of Batali's crew. He doesn't even know how to cut carrots right, and burns himself a few times, not to mention being deliberately pushed and burnt by the line cooks. The kitchen is a high-adrenaline, ultra-competitive, almost backstabbing atmosphere (familiar to those who have read Anthony Bourdain's accounts of the back room at any restaurant), but over time Buford manages to win the grudging respect of many of the restaurant employees. It's the hard-drinking, hard-partying Batali, with his high expectations and volatile temper, who most readers may want to find out more about, and he certainly gets a warts-and-all treatment here. (Did you want to know that Batali plucked old wilted carrot tops from the garbage and thought of a way to serve them?) A scholar of the history of food, as well, Buford interlaces his account with ruminations on a few specific dishes, such as the definition of short rib, or the etymology of pasta shapes, or when cooks started using egg yolk to make pasta (he spends a lot of time with medieval manuscripts trying to find out the truly old ways). All of this is blended together skillfully and served up hot, a vivid and truthful memoir of culinary adventure, of all the glamor and grime of running a restaurant, of seeking the very best in properly prepared ingredients and enjoyment of food culture.