Bobby Gold Stories [Hardcover]

Anthony Bourdain (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 19, 2004

Bestselling author Tony Bourdain is back with a new novel, his first fiction since the groundbreaking success of Kitchen Confidential.

Bobby Gold is a loveable criminal. After doing ten years in the clinker, he's out and ready for work. With not even an attempt to play it straight, he's back to breaking bones for tough guys. His turf: the club scene and restaurant racket. It's not that he enjoys the job-Bobby has real heart-but he's good at it and a guy has to make a living. Things change when he meets Nikki, the cook at a club most definitely not in his territory. Smitten, he can't stay away. Bobby Gold had known trouble before, but with Nikki the sauté bitch in his life, things take a turn for life or death.

Inspired by Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories, The Bobby Gold Stories is a gem of a novel featuring the best of Bourdain's work. Fans will recognize the gangster riffs of Bone in the Throat, the antics of the sexy criminal couple of Gone Bamboo, and the brilliant restaurant scenes from Kitchen Confidential. Distilled into a fast and furious, pitch-perfect story of food, sex, crimes and mayhem, The Bobby Gold Stories is sure to become a modern classic.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Author Anthony Bourdain is a talented chef whose two previous thrillers (Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo) were seasoned with the kind of culinary details that delighted the Food Channel-loving fans of his successful nonfiction books. The foodies will slaver over a wonderfully wrought scene in his latest caper novel--it's set at a chic Manhattan restaurant where a gourmand gangster with a picky palate turns the chef's menu upside down and stiffs the poor waiter who has to accommodate him. But the rest of this otherwise slight and unseasoned novel doesn't live up to that wonderful appetizer. Its protagonist is Bobby Gold, an ex-con who works as a security guard at Eddie Fish's Nightclub and is involved with a sexy sous-chef named Nikki whose preparation of a special meal for her lover reads like Bourdain's version of foreplay. But when Nikki rips off the restaurant receipts and Bobby gets on the wrong side of a mob plan to kill Eddie's appetite for good while recouping the money, Bourdain's plotting goes sour and the ending fails to satisfy. Still, it's a nice side dish to go with a good cookbook, or even one of the author's zany true stories of what goes on behind the swinging doors of many real-life restaurants (Kitchen Confidential, A Cook's Tour). --Jane Adams --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

With the same explosive energy and irreverent humor with which he described the behind-the-scenes affairs of the restaurant industry in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain revisits some of the themes that made him famous: passion, food and violence. The novel (Bourdain's third, after Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo) tells the story of Bobby Gold, probably the world's most unlikely gangster. A nice Jewish pre-med student implicated in a drug deal gone bad, Bobby goes to prison for 10 years and emerges with an entirely different set of uses for his knowledge of anatomy. Once released, he goes to work for his old friend Eddie Fish, a mobster turned nightclub owner, and falls in love with Nikki, a boisterous sous-chef with dangerous ambitions. Bobby and Nikki get involved in a botched robbery, forcing both to run for their lives. Their seedy shenanigans are wittily chronicled by Bourdain, in his nouveau hard-boiled prose ("'You want truffle jiz? Get your own truffle jiz, cabron' "). In one memorable set piece, Bobby engages in multiple pages of rueful conversation with an old fish wholesaler who's late on a payment to Eddie and knows he's about to be worked over (" `I get to pick the arm?' `Sure,' said Bobby. `Your choice. You pick it' "). Readers will once again be delighted by Bourdain's charming, rugged sensibility, like a modern-day Damon Runyon, and his gourmet blend of wit, suspense and style.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (June 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596917229
• ISBN-13: 978-1596917224
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Anthony Bourdain is the author of the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo, in addition to the megabestsellers Medium Raw, Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour. His work has appeared in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and he is a contributing authority for Food Arts magazine. He is the host of the popular television show No Reservations.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been great, September 26, 2005

By 

Big Daddy Duker (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bobby Gold Stories: A Novel (Paperback)

I was really excited when I started reading this book. The characters were fairly deep and well-developed, and the circumstances were at once amusing and understandable. And then I was halfway through the book and nothing had happened yet. Lo and behold, I finished the book, and still, nothing really happened. There is a rushed bit about robbing a restaurant and running from gangsters, but it all happens so fast that there is no time to really care. The writing is good, the characters are interesting, but this book should have been at least twice as long as it is. In its present form, it reads like a story from a talented writer who realized on Monday night that he had a dealine on Tuesday morning.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This is far from Bourdain's best work, October 16, 2003

By 

Sibelius (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bobby Gold Stories (Hardcover)

For those of you looking for more in the vein of 'Kitchen Confidential' or 'Cook's Tour,' you may want to skip to the next item on your To-Read list. Anthony Bourdain switches to his fiction hat in his latest outing - a brisk paced read written in minimalist brushstrokes chronicling the adventures of Bobby Gold a tough-as-nails, recently released ex-con who is smitten w/the fetching saute cook at a niteclub/restaurant that he works the security detail on. For fans of hard-boiled crime fiction, this book may leave you feeling a bit unsatisified as the narrative is somewhat lacking in painting pictures of grimy crime worlds, and ingenious criminial schemes, et al. But what Bourdain clearly excels at and ultimately makes this slim-read somewhat worth your while are the moments detailing the inner workings of restaurants and the capturing of colorful banter between chefs, cooks, doing their jobs and talking smack amongst each other.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Something missing, May 4, 2003

By 

IKL (Weehawken, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bobby Gold Stories (Hardcover)

I could not wait to get another book from Tony. However, this one seems to be missing something. I liked "Bone In the Throat" and felt that "Gone Bamboo" was good as well. This one, however, seems overwhelmingly simple in comparison. It does have Tony's wit and the food references and the mafia connection but not as many twists and turns as the other two books. We also miss out on the colorful scene descriptions. It's just too simple. If you haven't read Bourdain's fiction yet, start with the other two and then finish off with this one. Tony, I hope the Les Halles cookbook will be better.