I love food so much, and I love a good book about food. This book started out strong— give me a chaotic kitchen and a newbie line cook or prep guy and I’m sold! But the longer I read, the fewer stories and inspiring food experiences I found and the more realllllllly in-depth explanations of every thing Bill ever thought of and person he ever met there were. It was too much. I couldn’t keep up.

The quote on the front of my copy of the book says, “A superbly detailed picture of life in a top restaurant kitchen…” and YES! It was! For like 15% of the book. Was hoping for so much more of that.

Above the bar code on the back cover of Heat, to the right of the ISBN, the book is categorized as “cooking.” However, this is anything but a cook book.

Bill Buford’s subtitle says it better: “An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.” Not until the reader finishes this raucous account of the writer’s quest, however, does this description make sense.

First, the “amateur” is the author himself. Buford, a journalist by trade, was once the fiction editor for The New Yorker. Absolutely not a professional chef, he grew into a knowledgeable cook. Not without “adventures!” This implies “misadventures,” from which the writer weaves tale after tale with the sort of humor I’ve enjoyed in stories by Bill Bryson.

The terms “kitchen slave,” “line cook,” “pasta-maker,” and “apprentice” provide a chronological outline of Buford’s progress. He leverages his personal friendship with a celebrity chef, Mario Batali, to gain access to a restaurant kitchen as a volunteer worker bee (or “slave”). Over time, he works his way up to a position on the paid kitchen staff. Eventually, he travels to Italy to learn from the people from whom Mario learned about Italian cooking. His curiosity about the history of Italian cuisine as the possible source of French cooking motivates him to sign on for an apprenticeship with a butcher in a small town in Tuscany.

You might pick up an insight or two about food preparation if you read Heat. You’re sure to get an idea of what working in a restaurant kitchen in New York City must be like. What I enjoyed most about this nonfiction narrative, however, was Buford's description of such characters as Chef Mario Batali and the “Dante Quoting” Tuscan butcher, Dario Cecchini. These two, in particular, are larger than life and are enormously entertaining.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to read Heat, even after I started it, but I’m glad I did, and you will be too.

A long, meandering tale about the author’s culinary journey under the guise of working under Mario Batali.

I feel hoodwinked and bamboozled by the synopsis, expecting to learn what it’s like to work for the world renowned (and fallen) chef. There are references to him- and they are unintentionally cringey considering the allegations that came out years after the book was published. But the story is more about Bill’s quest to be like (or surpass) Mario.

I take umbrage at him taking away a coveted spot in a kitchen for over a year, just for a story, setting back other’s careers for a dalliance. The author jumps all over the place in his story and it’s easy to lose track of who he is talking about or why they are important.

I did find it interesting when the Italians spoke of small scale food, and the care that goes into the food they eat and the meat they consume. I made a note to definitely visit the farmer’s market more often.

At first, I really enjoyed the almost manic pace this book started out with. I felt like it really helped to capture the sense of organized chaos that seemed to be the atmosphere of the kitchen the author was working in, but the more I read the more put off I found myself, and I have found some difficulty putting into words what it was that was bothering me. The book itself is well-written. The characters are mostly unlikeable. I found the information about how a three star kitchen works very intriguing, the way pasta is made and how that has changed over the years very neat to read about, and the basics of butchery interesting.

I am not a person who is constantly thinking about privilege and trying to find a way to work it into my every interaction. However, the more I read about the author's journey, the more I felt myself struck by the enormity of his privilege, which is fine, most of us have privileges in some way or another that others don't have access to; however, towards the end of the book he starts making sweeping statements about saving society by returning to "small food" rather than "big food." Big Food being manufactured, factory farmed, cheap, easy access food and Small Food being food made with care by small farmers, cooks, butchers, with their own hands. And I couldn't help but laugh at this idea being posed by a man who is so wealthy and privileged that he could just quit his day job and move to Italy for an undetermined amount of time to work with people who have worked with their hands to make food for generations because they had no choice and no other way to make the money necessaries their families to carry on living.

Small Food is a great sounding idea, when you have the time and the money to spend necessary to produce it, but a shocking number of Americans are living right around the poverty line, will never have the money to leave the country for a three day vacation, let alone a six month trip to Italy to learn about how to properly butcher meat. These people are working two, or more, jobs, spending every waking hour trying to make enough money to survive and they don't have the time or the resources to support the Small Food community, not to mention the number of impoverished people living in food deserts with access to nothing but Big Food. Small Food is a thing for the rich. Big Food is how people in poverty manage to feed themselves and their children on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Buford is opining the lack of knowledge for what our food is and where it comes from, and shocked that there are people who don't care about Island Vacations and Flat Screen TVs.