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298 of 307 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Delightful Grease-Fire of a Book, June 17, 2006
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!
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100 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
BLOOD. GOSSIP. PAIN. HUMILIATION. ADVENTURE. GLUTTONY. BACHANALIA., June 19, 2006
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.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Intern, October 25, 2006
Somewhere around the middle of his life, Bill Buford decided that he wanted to escape the confines of a writing job at the "New Yorker" and offer himself up to Mario Batali at the super-chic restaurant Babbo as an intern: as in hard work, long hours and no pay. This is dedication on the one hand and a fulfillment of his lifelong interest/fascination with Food: its history, its preparation, its art as well as its business and technical side on the other.
In "Heat" Buford offers up a Memoir/Diary of his time at Babbo (he aptly calls this his "Kitchen Slave" days) as well as his trek to Tuscany to learn the art of Pasta and to Panzano to apprentice himself to the most famous butcher in Italy, Dario Cecchini.
As someone who has spent most of my life in and around the food business, I recognize so much of what Buford relates: "When I made the decision to become a Chef, I accepted I would never claim a sick day for the rest of my life. It's one of the sacrifices of my calling."
And while working the Grill station at Babbo, Buford waxes poetically: "The Grill Station is Hell. You stand at it for five minutes and you think this is what Dante had in mind. It is in a dark hot corner--hotter than any spot in the kitchen, hotter than anywhere else in your life" Or when Frankie at Babbo explains to Buford the simple pleasure of preparing food: "You make the food, (Frankie) said." "The simple good feeling he was describing might be akin to what you'd experience making a toy or a piece of furniture, or maybe even a work of art...this is an elementary thing that is seldom articulated."
Along with the Memoir musings, Buford also goes into the history of food. For one: When did the Italians begin to use Eggs to bind the flour for Pasta? Or when Caterina de Medici left Italy for France did she indeed take all of the Italian Court recipes and Cooks and began the French Cooking tradition? Good questions, easy to answer? Not really and Buford's investigation is fascinating.
Bill Buford has written a terrific book covering all manner of real-life experiences as well as relating his investigations of and on the philosophy and history of all manner of food, social and moral topics. But at the center of "Heat" stands the man Buford himself: committed, dedicated, funny, resourceful and witty as hell.
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