Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage) (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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

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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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--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Buford's voice echoes the rhythms of his own writing style. Writing about his break from working as a New Yorker editor and learning firsthand about the world of food, Buford guns his reading into hyperspeed when he is jazzed about a particularly tangy anecdote, and plays with his vocal tone and pitch when mimicking others' voices. At its base, Buford's voice is tinged with a jovial lilt, as if he is amused by his life as a "kitchen slave" and by the outsize personalities of the people he meets along the way. Less authoritative than blissfully confused, Buford speaks the way he writes, as a well-informed but never entirely knowledgeable outsider to the world of food love. Listening to his imitation of star chef Mario Batali's kinetic squeal, Buford ably conveys his abiding love for the teachers and companions of his brief, eventful life as a cook.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Product Details Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Vintage (June 26, 2007) Language: English ISBN-10: 1400034477 ISBN-13: 978-1400034475 Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (174 customer reviews) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,008 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books) Popular in this category: (What's this?) #34 in  Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Gastronomy

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	93% buy the item featured on this page: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage) 4.2 out of 5 stars (174) $10.20
	2% buy The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America 4.4 out of 5 stars (109) $11.56
	2% buy Kitchen Confidential Updated Ed: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.) 4.2 out of 5 stars (625) $10.85
	2% buy The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection 4.5 out of 5 stars (67) $10.88

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Customer Reviews

174 Reviews 5 star:  (88) 4 star:  (53) 3 star:  (20) 2 star:  (5) 1 star:  (8)           Average Customer Review 4.2 out of 5 stars (174 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews 275 of 284 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Grease-Fire of a Book, June 17, 2006 By  M. T. Campos "LocalPeanut" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    This review is from: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Hardcover) I don't go to restaurants. I don't watch FOOD Channel. I don't even order take-out. I'm just a pizza and burger guy with an occasional side trip to Taco Bell for my veggies. So why was I reading this book? My lunch partner was reading this weirdly yellow hardback and slowly choking on his burrito as he chuckled through Page 230 where the author had become a walking grease fire. Now, I can understand the humor behind being lit up like a Christmas tree in my kitchen (I'd done that after turning on the burners without removing my Hungryman TV dinner carton on top of it.) But a whole book of such mishaps? Ah, my friend urged this book on me and predicted I'd be converted! He would be able to persuade me to go to an eatery that didn't have paper boats of onion rings or plastic packets of mayo. I would want to eat ramps (huh?) and autumn squash! I would want to eat fennel pollen!! And he was right! I was plastered to this book for the next week and a half. Buford started his quest to understand what goes on behind the professional kitchen, in Mario Batali's restaurant, Babbo. He offers himself as an unpaid servant. He promptly cuts himself while deboning ducks and hunting for their "oysters." And his whole world is never the same again. After months of culinary bondage, he flies to Italy to roll pasta with Betta (why you make pasta like an old woman, eh?) and butcher tall cows with warbling Dario and carve thighs with the Maestro (of the Monster Hands) in Tuscany. I suffered with him as Molto Mario roots in trash cans, retrieving celery leaves and lamb kidneys that shouldn't have been tossed in the garbage. I puzzled over the importance of broccoli floret heads to customers. I winced as he burned himself --- dropping ribs in popping olive oil--- by hand. (There's some tremendously good, bloody vivid descriptions of Buford's kitchen's injuries.) Its almost like reading a Clive Barker book with lard and chickpeas! I laughed as he hauls a whole pig (not a mere piglet) to his home in Manhattan so he can butcher it. I cackled as he drops munchkin pasta on the floor-- trying to roll it to impossible thinness. I marveled at how Buford "touched" meat for "doneness" and the resemblance of tortellini pasta to "innie" belly buttons. I snickered at the almost pornographic way . . . sausages were made. I groaned at creepy Riccardo and the ever-swelling polenta. This book is pullulating with such jewels. And I haven't even spoken of the bizarre personalities behind that reduction of liver in butter sauce. There's Mario Batali, bigger than life and much engaged with pig fat. Marco Pierre White and his restaurant empire and his tasty thoughts on the aging of game birds. Yuck! Then there's the sous chefs, the prep chefs, the grill guys and the pasta guys. All fascinating and as unforgetttable, in their way, as Batali and White's tantrums! Andy and Frankie, Memo, Tony Liu and Alex with their dreams of owning their own restaurants. The clan of Latin cooks and servers who inexplicably all come from the same town . . . Read this book. Even if you're not a foodie. Even if your idea of fine dining is a tin of sardines on instant rice! You'll love every minute of it. 5 Stars Plus Plus Plus! 91 of 97 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars BLOOD. GOSSIP. PAIN. HUMILIATION. ADVENTURE. GLUTTONY. BACHANALIA., June 19, 2006 By  J. V. Lewis (secure undisclosed location) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)       This review is from: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Hardcover) This is one of the most entertaining books I have ever read. The fact that it is about kitchens and food and chefs, etc. hardly matters: it is, first and last, a swashbuckling adventure in which our hero, the author, driven by curiosity and some unreasonable lust for kitchen skills, faces the heat in the kitchens of a couple of the most outsized, megalomaniacal chefs in the world and in a butcher shop in Italy. There is gossip of rare incision, gory details that beggar fiction, scenarios beyond the imagination of theater, all falling over each other pell-mell because Bill Buford's lust for skills and experience is like a locomotive and his writing is brilliant. His humility is the subject, really. It makes the story possible, makes the humor irresistable, puts him in situations that most of us are too proud to ever experience, and gives his prose the most winning lightness and warmth. By the end of the book, which I lamented like I was losing a pal, it became clear that Buford is a sort of modern-day Don Quixote, venturing forth into the unkown driven by a vague but powerful sense of childlike curiosity... actually, maybe he is the Elephant Child, repeatedly spanked by the grownups for his "Satiable Curtiosity"... or maybe he's a new breed of Late-Empire reporter, dutifully recording the vicissitudes of our wealth-enabled excesses from the foxholes of gluttony. Fact remains that he has shown us something keenly observed, something that is right under our noses but almost invisible, and he has done it so well because he is so omnivorous in his hunger for experience and so teachable. Here's another stab at describing Mr. Buford: he is the anti-Bond, in no way jaded, un-blinkered by savoir-faire, open to the world, and fantastically observant as a result. This is great reportage, great story-telling, great humor... I strongly recommend it, especially if you loved Kitchen Confidential and The Reach of a Chef. Outstanding. 22 of 23 people found the following review helpful: 3.0 out of 5 stars Mostly entertaining but not satiating, June 5, 2007 By  Westley (Stuck in my head) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)       This review is from: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Hardcover) Bill Buford decided in his early forties to ditch his job as a successful New Yorker editor to enter the world of food. What started with a simple assignment to write a magazine story on Mario Batali, the reknowned Food Network chef, ended up taking him to Italy and becoming a cook. "Heat" details this journey, including the back stories of numerous chefs and foodies with whom Buford ending up working, such as Batali. The book is entertaining for the most part; hearing about the difficulties of being a line cook in a three-star New York restaurant is certainly interesting. Buford started at the bottom by prepping, including spending hours dicing carrots only to have them thrown out because they were done incorrectly. The book certainly conveys the message that great food requires precision and working in these kinds of restaurants is brutal. Of course, we've seen this same idea before in numerous other "insider" books. What sets "Heat" slightly apart is the path that Buford takes. When he first starts cooking, he's the "kitchen b*tch" in Batali's Babbo Italian restaurant, and you really don't think he'll make it for more than a few months. However, he becomes enthralled with food, in particular homemade authentic Italian food. He becomes convinced that he has to follow Batali's lead and spend time as an intern in Italy, first learning pasta and then working for a famous Tuscan butcher. Buford meets some interesting characters along the way and tells some fun stories. However, I could never shake the feeling that Buford was just playing a role. Indeed, he tries to downplay the fact that he entered this world as a writer - we don't get the full explanation of why he started in Batali's kitchen (i.e., to write a story) until page 141. In addition, he's supposed to be an underling in Batali's kitchen, yet several times he's invited to meals with Batali and treated as something different than the lowest ranking cook in the kitchen. Perhaps this complaint is quibbling, but it broke the tone for me enough to dock the book a star. Foodies of all sorts will probably enjoy reading this book and may even learn a few things, but I still found it strangely unsatisfying.		Ad feedback   Most Recent Customer Reviews 4.0 out of 5 stars For a grandson-chef We ordered a copy of "Heat" to give to one of our grandsons who is working as a pasta chef during his interim year before going to university. Read more Published 1 month ago by Kevin J. Kearney 4.0 out of 5 stars Batali, Italy, and the search for the perfect pasta... Buford's time in Mario Batali's kitchen was well-spent as it allowed him to give us a real look at the life in a top kitchen, from a writer's perspective. Read more Published 3 months ago by J. Carroll 2.0 out of 5 stars A little dissapointed I found this to be a very slow read. I love food books and the stories of people with food, but I found this to be very borring. Read more Published 3 months ago by R. F. Husted 3.0 out of 5 stars What if Buford's boss at the NYer had him take on a chef as intern? What if Batali had promised Buford's boss at the New Yorker endless free meals at Babbo if Buford would take him on as fiction editor? Read more Published 5 months ago by KEM44 1.0 out of 5 stars A terrible, disjointed, mess What a mess of a book. I really wanted to like this one, and it comes with many high regards from the food world (and outside as well)... I have no idea why. Read more Published 5 months ago by D. Tiberio 5.0 out of 5 stars Can't put it down! It's not even about Mario Battali; it's about cooking, food, and the business of cooking food. Absolutely recommended. Published 5 months ago by Lena R. 3.0 out of 5 stars a peak into the life.... This was an entertaining opportunity to get a glimpse of a chef's world. The bottom line for me was you have to really love that life to be able to put up with the intensity, the... Read more Published 6 months ago by rms 5.0 out of 5 stars A very good read I thoroughly enjoyed this book. As a home cook and former FoodTV junkie, it was refreshing to read a layperson's attempts at making a go in the restaurant business. Read more Published 8 months ago by fallwitch 5.0 out of 5 stars even non-cookers will like this! I picked this up, never intending to read it cover to cover, but found the writing and the story so interesting that I kept right on going. Read more Published 9 months ago by Maeve Payne 5.0 out of 5 stars Just Loved it! If you love to cook,create, learn and/ or discover things about food, this is a great read. Reader who enjoyed of Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Animal, Vegetable,... Read more Published 10 months ago by Sparkle Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (June 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400034477
• ISBN-13: 978-1400034475
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (174 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,008 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #34 in

  Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Gastronomy

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

275 of 284 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Grease-Fire of a Book, June 17, 2006

By	M. T. Campos "LocalPeanut" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Hardcover)

I don't go to restaurants. I don't watch FOOD Channel. I don't even order take-out. I'm just a pizza and burger guy with an occasional side trip to Taco Bell for my veggies. So why was I reading this book?

My lunch partner was reading this weirdly yellow hardback and slowly choking on his burrito as he chuckled through Page 230 where the author had become a walking grease fire. Now, I can understand the humor behind being lit up like a Christmas tree in my kitchen (I'd done that after turning on the burners without removing my Hungryman TV dinner carton on top of it.) But a whole book of such mishaps?

Ah, my friend urged this book on me and predicted I'd be converted! He would be able to persuade me to go to an eatery that didn't have paper boats of onion rings or plastic packets of mayo. I would want to eat ramps (huh?) and autumn squash! I would want to eat fennel pollen!!

And he was right! I was plastered to this book for the next week and a half. Buford started his quest to understand what goes on behind the professional kitchen, in Mario Batali's restaurant, Babbo. He offers himself as an unpaid servant. He promptly cuts himself while deboning ducks and hunting for their "oysters."

And his whole world is never the same again. After months of culinary bondage, he flies to Italy to roll pasta with Betta (why you make pasta like an old woman, eh?) and butcher tall cows with warbling Dario and carve thighs with the Maestro (of the Monster Hands) in Tuscany.

I suffered with him as Molto Mario roots in trash cans, retrieving celery leaves and lamb kidneys that shouldn't have been tossed in the garbage. I puzzled over the importance of broccoli floret heads to customers. I winced as he burned himself --- dropping ribs in popping olive oil--- by hand. (There's some tremendously good, bloody vivid descriptions of Buford's kitchen's injuries.) Its almost like reading a Clive Barker book with lard and chickpeas!

I laughed as he hauls a whole pig (not a mere piglet) to his home in Manhattan so he can butcher it. I cackled as he drops munchkin pasta on the floor-- trying to roll it to impossible thinness. I marveled at how Buford "touched" meat for "doneness" and the resemblance of tortellini pasta to "innie" belly buttons. I snickered at the almost pornographic way . . . sausages were made. I groaned at creepy Riccardo and the ever-swelling polenta.

This book is pullulating with such jewels. And I haven't even spoken of the bizarre personalities behind that reduction of liver in butter sauce. There's Mario Batali, bigger than life and much engaged with pig fat. Marco Pierre White and his restaurant empire and his tasty thoughts on the aging of game birds. Yuck! Then there's the sous chefs, the prep chefs, the grill guys and the pasta guys. All fascinating and as unforgetttable, in their way, as Batali and White's tantrums! Andy and Frankie, Memo, Tony Liu and Alex with their dreams of owning their own restaurants. The clan of Latin cooks and servers who inexplicably all come from the same town . . .

Read this book. Even if you're not a foodie. Even if your idea of fine dining is a tin of sardines on instant rice! You'll love every minute of it. 5 Stars Plus Plus Plus!

91 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BLOOD. GOSSIP. PAIN. HUMILIATION. ADVENTURE. GLUTTONY. BACHANALIA., June 19, 2006

By	J. V. Lewis (secure undisclosed location) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Hardcover)

This is one of the most entertaining books I have ever read. The fact that it is about kitchens and food and chefs, etc. hardly matters: it is, first and last, a swashbuckling adventure in which our hero, the author, driven by curiosity and some unreasonable lust for kitchen skills, faces the heat in the kitchens of a couple of the most outsized, megalomaniacal chefs in the world and in a butcher shop in Italy. There is gossip of rare incision, gory details that beggar fiction, scenarios beyond the imagination of theater, all falling over each other pell-mell because Bill Buford's lust for skills and experience is like a locomotive and his writing is brilliant.

His humility is the subject, really. It makes the story possible, makes the humor irresistable, puts him in situations that most of us are too proud to ever experience, and gives his prose the most winning lightness and warmth. By the end of the book, which I lamented like I was losing a pal, it became clear that Buford is a sort of modern-day Don Quixote, venturing forth into the unkown driven by a vague but powerful sense of childlike curiosity... actually, maybe he is the Elephant Child, repeatedly spanked by the grownups for his "Satiable Curtiosity"... or maybe he's a new breed of Late-Empire reporter, dutifully recording the vicissitudes of our wealth-enabled excesses from the foxholes of gluttony. Fact remains that he has shown us something keenly observed, something that is right under our noses but almost invisible, and he has done it so well because he is so omnivorous in his hunger for experience and so teachable. Here's another stab at describing Mr. Buford: he is the anti-Bond, in no way jaded, un-blinkered by savoir-faire, open to the world, and fantastically observant as a result.

This is great reportage, great story-telling, great humor... I strongly recommend it, especially if you loved Kitchen Confidential and The Reach of a Chef. Outstanding.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mostly entertaining but not satiating, June 5, 2007

By	Westley (Stuck in my head) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Hardcover)

Bill Buford decided in his early forties to ditch his job as a successful New Yorker editor to enter the world of food. What started with a simple assignment to write a magazine story on Mario Batali, the reknowned Food Network chef, ended up taking him to Italy and becoming a cook. "Heat" details this journey, including the back stories of numerous chefs and foodies with whom Buford ending up working, such as Batali.

The book is entertaining for the most part; hearing about the difficulties of being a line cook in a three-star New York restaurant is certainly interesting. Buford started at the bottom by prepping, including spending hours dicing carrots only to have them thrown out because they were done incorrectly. The book certainly conveys the message that great food requires precision and working in these kinds of restaurants is brutal. Of course, we've seen this same idea before in numerous other "insider" books.

What sets "Heat" slightly apart is the path that Buford takes. When he first starts cooking, he's the "kitchen b*tch" in Batali's Babbo Italian restaurant, and you really don't think he'll make it for more than a few months. However, he becomes enthralled with food, in particular homemade authentic Italian food. He becomes convinced that he has to follow Batali's lead and spend time as an intern in Italy, first learning pasta and then working for a famous Tuscan butcher.

Buford meets some interesting characters along the way and tells some fun stories. However, I could never shake the feeling that Buford was just playing a role. Indeed, he tries to downplay the fact that he entered this world as a writer - we don't get the full explanation of why he started in Batali's kitchen (i.e., to write a story) until page 141. In addition, he's supposed to be an underling in Batali's kitchen, yet several times he's invited to meals with Batali and treated as something different than the lowest ranking cook in the kitchen. Perhaps this complaint is quibbling, but it broke the tone for me enough to dock the book a star. Foodies of all sorts will probably enjoy reading this book and may even learn a few things, but I still found it strangely unsatisfying.