Editorial Product Review:Item Description:A highly acclaimed writer and editor, Bill Buford left his job at
The New Yorker for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, the revolutionary Italian restaurant created and ruled by superstar chef Mario Batali.
Finally realizing a long-held desire to learn first-hand the experience of restaurant cooking, Buford soon finds himself drowning in improperly cubed carrots and scalding pasta water on his quest to learn the tricks of the trade. His love of Italian food then propels him on journeys further afield: to Italy, to discover the secrets of pasta-making and, finally, how to properly slaughter a pig. Throughout, Buford stunningly details the complex aspects of Italian cooking and its long history, creating an engrossing and visceral narrative stuffed with insight and humor.
Amazon.com Review:Bill Buford's funny and engaging book
Heat offers readers a rare glimpse behind the scenes in Mario Batali's kitchen. Who better to review the book for Amazon.com, than Anthony Bourdain, the man who first introduced readers to the wide array of lusty and colorful characters in the restaurant business? We asked Anthony Bourdain to read
Heat and give us his take. We loved it. So did he. Check out his review below.
--Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain is host of the Discovery Channel's No Reservations, executive chef at Les Halles in Manhattan, and author of the bestselling and groundbreaking Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, A Cook's Tour, Bone in the Throat, and many others. His latest book, The Nasty Bits will be released on May 16, 2006. Heat is a remarkable work on a number of fronts--and for a number of reasons. First, watching the author, an untrained, inexperienced and middle-aged desk jockey slowly transform into not just a useful line cook--but an extraordinarily knowledgable one is pure pleasure. That he chooses to do so primarily in the notoriously difficult, cramped kitchens of New York's three star
Babbo provides further sado-masochistic fun. Buford not only accurately and hilariously describes the painfully acquired techniques of the professional cook (and his own humiations), but chronicles as well the mental changes--the 'kitchen awareness' and peculiar world view necessary to the kitchen dweller. By end of book, he's even talking like a line cook.
Secondly, the book is a long overdue portrait of the real Mario Batali and of the real Marco Pierre White--two complicated and brilliant chefs whose coverage in the press--while appropriately fawning--has never described them in their fully debauched, delightful glory. Buford has--for the first time--managed to explain White's peculiar--almost freakish brilliance--while humanizing a man known for terrorizing cooks, customers (and Batali). As for Mario--he is finally revealed for the Falstaffian, larger than life, mercurial, frighteningly intelligent chef/enterpreneur he really is. No small accomplishment. Other cooks, chefs, butchers, artisans and restaurant lifers are described with similar insight.
Thirdly,
Heat reveals a dead-on understanding--rare among non-chef writers--of the pleasures of 'making' food; the real human cost, the real requirements and the real adrenelin-rush-inducing pleasures of cranking out hundreds of high quality meals. One is left with a truly unique appreciation of not only what is truly good about food--but as importantly, who cooks--and why. I can't think of another book which takes such an unsparing, uncompromising and ultimately thrilling look at the quest for culinary excellence.
Heat brims with fascinating observations on cooking, incredible characters, useful discourse and argument-ending arcania. I read my copy and immediately started reading it again. It's going right in between Orwell's
Down and Out in Paris and London and Zola's
The Belly of Paris on my bookshelf.
--Anthony Bourdain
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Buyer Reviews
Average Buyer Rating:
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Great read - even for non-cooksI
I really don't cook but this is one of the top "passion for food vs. inside the food business" books out there, e.g Kitchen Confidential style. This, like the others, is fantastically interesting and fun to read. Mario Batalli features prominently in this book - and it's biographical in that regard - but it's also so much more. The subtitle is spot on as it reads as a true adventure story involving (mostly italian) food, fun and intricacies, and the people involved in it's growing, processing, creation, and savoring. It's written by a journalist rather than a pro chef.
Customer Rating: -
A amazing journey through food and cooking
In the last few years I have gotten really interested in food and cooking, and I have to say that having read dozens of great cookbooks and memoirs, this one stands out in my mind.
The author, a longtime food enthusiast and home cook, meets famed chef Mario Batali by chance at a dinner party and the chance encounter inspires him to write a series of articles about life in New York's acclaimed Babbo Restaurant. Working as a kitchen slave for Batali, Buford is by turns disastrous and hilarious, but the experience changes how he sees the restaurant industry and his relationship to cooking. As he spends months working his way up fro prep chef to line cook, he becomes a part of Babbo's disfunctional kitchen family, and decides to expand his knowledge as a chef by returning to Italy to apprentice with a celebrated Tuscan butcher. Buford intersperses his tales from the underbelly of the kithen with biographical bits about Batali's emergence as a celebrity chef, the history of Italian food, and the ins and outs of life at Babbo.
The book can be surprisingly touching and emotional, Bill Buford's crazy journey reminds us that we can never stop learning, or stop being open to our passions and interests, not matter where they may take us.
Customer Rating: -
You Need to Love the Kitchen
I love this book. If I could get my wife to read it, she would have lasted 10 pages. If you don't love to cook, love to experiment in the kitchen or love to eat at and critque fine restaurants, you might not understand this book. I finished this book wishing I could trade places with Buford. If you're a guy who would rather go to Lowe's instead of a kitchen supply store, this is probably not for you.
Customer Rating: -
Outsider Looking In
I've been a fairly faithful watcher of Top Chef, and a recent one of other restaurant/food based reality tv shows. I wondered if the kitchens were really as sexist as they were made out to be. I wondered how it was so "easy" to get meals brought out in 20 - 30 minutes. Those questions and more get answered. For example, I decided to make braised short ribs based on a Top Chef recipe and one of them ended up looking all weird and alien-like. I wasn't sure why it happened since the others were fine. This book explains it.
Bill Buford relays his misadventures with humor, very often at his own expense. I haven't read any of his other works so I'm not sure if it's his style of writing or if was lucky to be aware of how he looked as an enthusiastic cook with little knowledge to the professional kitchen staff. Some of his curiosities was not of much interest to me (like when the egg made it into the pasta) but others are well worth the reading (like when he takes a pig home to butcher it).
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