Customer Reviews

Don't Try This At Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Cooking at home has become it seems, a very big business indeed. Turn on the television and you find networks that show chefs demonstrating cuisines and styles, vendors hawking the multitude of cookware and gadgets, and in bookstores shelves abound with volumes that cater to every whim, fad, fashion and idea. Sometimes, what you get is junk. And rarely, you come across a jewel of a book that digs down into the heart and mystery of food, and you find something that's utterly new and bewitching.

Such was the case with reading this collection of tales and ancedotes from the heavy hitters in cooking, Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs is a mad, wild ride of everything that can go wrong. Whether they are disasters in a professional restaurant kitchen or on a catering job, the stories range from those that make you cringe in embarassment or sympathy, or those that make you laugh at a just reward served up to a snooty, rude customer.

There were several stories that I enjoyed immensely: Ferran Adria's tale of a shipment of lobsters that went bad for a banquet of three thousand; Mario Batali speaks of revenge on a martinet of a chef; Anthony Bourdain of a kitchen gone to hell on New Year's Eve when the chef had such a brilliant vision that it was doomed to failure; Claudia Fleming's tale of The Blob , and very nearly every tale in the book. There are stories of fights, ingredients gone haywire or AWOL, personality clashes that would make you cringe in horror.

But each one reveals something to the art of being a chef, and a good one at that. Namely, it's that the successful ones are good at the quirks of human behavior, at what it is that makes managing people to get the best out of them, of keeping your cool when everything is literally falling apart. Most have the talent of being able to laugh at the craziness of things, and able to be innovative when the circumstances warrant it. Most are able to tell their stories with both style and humor.

And all of them manage to provide a bit of insight for all of us who occansionally have the wild, mad dream of being a great chef. They're just as much cautionary tales as they are entertainment; it's become a well-known fact that most restaurants that open are going to close.

So if you are a fan of Food Channel or like to thumb through your collection of Gourmet magazine, you're probably going to like this collection. Editors Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman do a fine job of assembling the stories, all arranged in alphabetical order by the authors, with a short little bio in the front of each one. It's a fun read, with each one taking not much more than fifteen or twenty minutes to get through.

`Don't Try This At Home' is a collection of short pieces written by forty (40) of the world's most notable chefs and culinary figures, edited by culinary agent, Kimberly Witherspoon and culinary wordsmith, Andrew Friedman, known to me primarily as a co-author of Tom Valenti's two better than average cookbooks from an accomplished New York restaurant chef.

Two things which are misleading from the title are the fact that some of the contributors are not among `The World's Greatest Chefs' (from the subtitle at the top of the page) and many of the incidents recounted in the book are less about cooking per se than about relations between people in the kitchen, between the kitchen and management, and between the kitchen (back of the house) and the wait staff (front of the house).

There is no question that many of the contributors are among `The World's Greatest Chefs'. Chief among these are Ferran Adria, Daniel Boulud, Michel Richard, Eric Ripert, Norman Van Aken, Tom Colicchio, and Mario Batali. Oddly, the authors, Anthony Bourdain and Sara Moulton, of two of the most instructive pieces come from writers whose fame arises more from their writing and communicating experience than from purely culinary efforts. Bourdain's piece looks very much like a chapter from his famous book, `Kitchen Confidential' when it recounts a totally disastrous New Year's Eve dinner where the executive chef under whom Bourdain was serving as a sous chef planned the evening's celebratory meal and ordered all the provisions without giving any hint to the kitchen staff about the menu for the evening. The day and the piece opens with Bourdain and staff waiting for the chef while provisions arrive with absolutely no instructions on how to begin prepping the goods. Aside from the negligence of not leaving any instructions with his staff, the dinner plans were a disaster since most of the dishes came from the saute station, which had but four burners.

Bourdain's piece does offer some instructions to both amateurs and professionals on party planning, but it also violates the notion that no matter how serious the disaster, professional chefs always pull it off somehow through some creative imagination of by simple Herculean effort. Sometimes, things simply go irretrievably wrong.

Since he is one of my culinary heroes, I was particularly interested in the piece from Mario Batali, which says little about culinary technique and mountains about relations between people in the kitchen. Like some articles, the real name of Mario's antagonist is not revealed, so we can try to guess who this now-famous London chef and restaurateur is. I confess I actually read about this period in Mario's career in the Profile done in the `New Yorker' of two years ago, but I forget who the villain of the piece is. But, if you really want to know, track down the `New Yorker' culinary issue with the Batali profile.

In many ways, this book is the culinary version of `The world's funniest pets'. It's a guilty pleasure which may contribute to your understanding of human nature, but it is not likely to help your cooking one wit. The greatest impression I get from the book is the difference between the professional culinary workplace and the kind of technical, research oriented business office with which I am familiar. While I am certain that chef's like Colicchio, Batali, and Rippert can go for months with no disasters, I do get the sense from this and other sources that the professional kitchen is a human pressure cooker where tempers get as hot as the sautéed sole, about as often as that fish may be ordered.

Thus, I found this book remarkably entertaining and informative, but not for the reasons you may gather from the cover or the editors' introduction. If you liked `Kitchen Confidential', you will certainly like this book.

I read the excerpts from this collection in the New York Times Magazine and went and bought the book, I was so delighted with them. Dan Barber's piece about working for David Bouley and learning to "talk to the fish" was hilarious; It had never occurred to me that you have to listen to the food cooking as much as taste, see and smell it, to know if it's cooked properly. I was surprised to read all these readers comments slamming Gabrielle Hamilton's piece; I actually thought she showed uncustomary sensitivity for a chef, even letting this candidate through the door when he hadn't been straight up with her about being blind. Marcus Samuelson's piece about being a black man in a white kitchen was powerful and refreshingly thoughtful in contrast to the raucousness of many of the other pieces. I plan to give this to all my friends who devoured KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL, it has the same exuberance and behind the scenes details that bring down to earth what always looks so safe and easy on those cooking shows.

Very enjoyable! The short, self-contained vignettes offer a nice way to spend a few minutes at the end of the day or some other quiet time. Some of the stories are better than others, but most are quite entertaining.

Some notable entries: I laughed to the point of tears at Anthony Bourdain's contribution. I wanted to be in that kitchen with Jimmy Bradley, drunk and rowing to the Hawaii 5-0 theme. Also loved Heston Blumenthal, Hubert Keller, so many others. There were a few incidents that I, personally, would never have confessed - Mary Sue Millikin, Susan Feniger and Michel Richard - but that sure made for great reading.

All in all, there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours than browsing through this book.

Some of the pieces in this book are really funny, such as a tale of what happened when a hollandaise delivery met up with LA rush hour traffic. Many remind the reader than even the greatest of chefs is still human. Some of the pieces will amaze you with chefs' creativity in the face of diaster (one chef, for example, stuck with a ruined wedding cake, calls in the dogs). Unfortunately, some of the pieces are just plain boring. In one, for example, the "disaster" is that the narrator gets yelled at for throwing away some onions. I'm sure it was painful to him, but it's just not that much fun to read. In total, I'm not sure the good parts of the book make it worth shelling out money for. I borrowed mine from the library.

I am a professional chef of nearly forty years standing. Reading this was like reading my autobiography. The stories captured the essence of the profession's dark side: awful grinding labor, maniacally insane co-workers, impossible demands of customers.....and the short lived and highly addictive secret joys of overcoming all that to create a kind of elusive art.

I would make this mandatory reading for all aspiring chefs.....better for them than Escoffier!

Like every anthology, this book has its highs and lows. Expect that not every story is going to be an "OMG ROTFL" moment...but enough are that this definitely makes for good, light, juicy weekend-on-the-beach reading (or for reading wherever you happen to be!).

For the most part (barring notable exceptions like Anthony Bourdain), these are chefs, not writers, so don't come inside looking for a literary masterpiece... just some good old-fashioned storytelling about those moments when Things Went Wrong - big time.

I enjoyed the mix of chefs featured, which includes more than just the latest Food Network darlings (imagine my relief to discover there's no Jamie Oliver, Bobby Flay, Nigella or Emeril between these covers!). This collection highlights good chefs, period, regardless of network affiliation (Sara Moulton & Mario Batali are two notable FoodTV presences in the book).

(I was slightly disappointed that Alton Brown wasn't included, since he's such a great writer and lover of food, but I guess he's not a "star chef" in the same way... more like a tour guide to the strange and wonderful world of food.)

All the anecdotes are calculated to offer a peek at the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes the culinary world so fascinating to outsiders like me.

One quirk I would hesitate to even call a flaw...the editors, in their wisdom, organized all the stories in alphabetical order by their authors' names. This leads to weird "clumps" in the anthology - two Spanish chefs in a row, a few women in a row... when perhaps a more experienced editor would have arranged the stories into more of a progression.

Editors also tend to lead and finish with their strongest stories. It seems like Witherspoon and Friedman saw their role merely as providing a venue and letting the stories speak for themselves, avoiding passing judgement as to which stories were "best" and "worst." (I use that term relatively only, because they're all good).

In any event, that quirk aside, this is an enjoyable collection and would make a great gift for the (aspiring) chef, baker, gourmet or other foodie in your life - or to keep all for yourself!

I don't watch cooking shows on TV nor do I read gourmet cooking magazines or anything like that ~~ the names of the chefs in here don't mean anything to me. It's not personal. I just don't have the time nor the interest to read about them nor do I travel to eat at fine restaurants ... But this book is hilarious. It is one of the few books where I am lost in the giggles over the mishaps in the kitchens. And I love it.

I do cook and am a fairly good cook ~~ though not as good as these professionals are. I have messed up dishes often and have my embarrassing moments ~~ but not on the grand scale as these chefs. And I love the stories ~~ the wedding cake mishaps are my favorite ~~ especially Michel Richard's "Alibi" ~~ that one literally brought tears to my eyes. I can just see it all. Another favorite is "Our Big Brake" by Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger. One that brought sighs to my heart is Paul Kahan's "(Not) Ready for My Close-up." Another one is Tamara Murphy's "For The Birds" ~~ I just lost myself in the giggles over a plate of grilled cheese sandwiches (Ah. A dream to come true would be having a chef cooking for me!).

To be honest, I don't think there's a story in there that I didn't like. They all are funny and very human ~~ it brings a touch of humanness to the world's greatest cooks. And since I like to cook, I can definitely relate to their stories. And I love all of their stories. I cannot remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book!!

However, don't read this while you're hungry ~~ some of their descriptions of food will make you hungry and if you're like me, that doesn't have a modern up to date kitchen or pantry ~~ you'll find yourself raiding something wishing that you can finally taste what they are famous for making. A Ding Dong just won't do it. But maybe it will spur you to become a better chef in your own kitchen ~~ knowing that the greats are just as human as we all are.

10-18-07

This is one of the funniest books, I have read. I have lent it to many friends and we have had a good laugh at many of the stories. It's nice to see that professional chefs can also have disasters in the kitchen.

This is a must have for home cooks, would-be chefs, and people who just love the kitchen. In this humorous collection of stories, many chefs that have no reached the pinnacle of their careers share tales and snippets of life that include moments they were less than perfect. How many of us have ruined a dish by putting too much salt in the pot, or burned a turkey (or served one raw)? Turns out those sins are mild compared to some of the things these gods of food have done.

So many of the stories are just funny, you'll find yourself laughing out loud.

Sometimes when you watch cooking shows, or eat at a 5 star restaurant, it's easy to be intimidated by Chefs that seem to have perfected this craft. But this book will remind you that they have their off days as well, and that the gods of cuisine are just as human as the rest of us.

Highly recommended for everyone. Even if you don't cook, or aren't a foodie, this book is just funny.