In the Kitchen: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Patricia VolkArestaurant kitchen is a functional substitute for hell. Flames leap, plates fly—knives and fingers, too. They're also the default place immigrants, legal and otherwise, find work. At London's Imperial Hotel, the setting for Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, nobody speaks the same language and everybody is underpaid. Ali, acclaimed author of Brick Lane, nails the killer heat, killer fights and lethal grease buildup, all of it supervised by a simmering culinary Heathcliff, Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef.Lightfoot dropped out of school at 16 to begin paying his kitchen dues, working crazy hours with crazy people while studying food chemistry and Brillat-Savarin. Along the way, he picked up scarred hands and a ravaged psyche. At 24, given his own restaurant, it went straight up his nose. Now, almost 20 years later, two wealthy Londoners have agreed to back Gabriel in a new restaurant, Lightfoot's, where he'll serve Classic French, precisely executed. Rognons de veau dijonnaise, poussin en cocotte Bonne Femme, tripes à la mode de Caen. In postmodern balsamic-drenched London, Gabriel is confident traditional French is poised for a comeback. Then the naked corpse of a Ukrainian night porter is discovered in the Imperial's basement, his head in a pool of blood. There is no one to claim the body. The ripple-free effect of a human death unhinges Gabriel. He develops a voluptuous need to self-sabotage. Visual manifestations include a Dr. Strangelove arm tic, shaking limbs and violent bald-spot scratching. Gabriel cheats on his fiancée and lies to his lover. The story is told in the third person, but through Gabriel's point of view. Intimacy juggles distance: After a certain point, he could not stop himself. His desire was a foul creature that climbed on his back and wrapped its long arms around his neck.Ali is brilliant at showing loss and adaptation in a polyglot culture. Her descriptions of the changing peoplescape are fresh. But inside Gabriel's head is not the most compelling place to be. A tragic nonhero, he thinks with his one-eyed implacable foe. It does not help that a recurring dream crumbles him, and since Gabriel doesn't understand the dream, neither does the reader. It assumes an unsustainable importance. You can play Freud or you can turn the page.Ali is not plot-averse: she provides a mysterious death, a hotel sex-trade scam, a slave-labor scheme, missing money and a dying parent. Yet Lightfoot is a character in search of a motive. It's a tribute to Ali that we care. Here is a true bastard, ravaged and out of control. In the Kitchen has the thud and knock of life—inexplicable, impenetrable, not sewn up at all. As Gabriel's lover is fond of saying: Tchh. (June)Patricia Volk is the author, most recently, of the memoir Stuffed and the novel To My Dearest Friends(both from Knopf).
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From The New Yorker

Gabriel, a chef from the North of England, dreams of his own restaurant, but is resigned to proving himself in a busy London hotel. Meanwhile, a death in the hotel basement exposes the precarious existence of the undocumented immigrants who take on the unglamorous work that makes everything run smoothly, and Gabe finds himself entangled with a young Belarusan woman forced into prostitution. Ali has taken on a number of big ideas: mental health, immigration, the bubble economy. But the novel wears its influences—“Kitchen Confidential,” anti-slavery reports—heavily, and many of the characters feel more like object lessons than like personalities. The feeling is only heightened by some cliché-ridden prose: “They had to dance on their toes today, and that was the truth. He wasn’t taking a bullet for anyone.”
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (June 16, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 141657168X
• ISBN-13: 978-1416571681
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #165,579 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Oh, so uneven!, July 29, 2009

By	Daffy Du (Del Mar, CA United States) - See all my reviews

(What's this?)

Here's my dilemma. Based on In the Kitchen, Monica Ali clearly is a talented writer with an eye for detail and a rare gift for turning a phrase and expressing insights in fresh ways. At the same time, she's produced a novel that is too often a slog and painful to read. There are so many characters, it's hard to keep track of them (particularly all the kitchen staff), and few are especially likable; none are especially engaging. (In 436 pages, I didn't get emotionally involved with any of them--not even the pathetic waif the protagonist takes in or the kitchen crew whose back stories veered from the horrific to the banal.)

The plot just creeps along for 4/5 of the book, until close to the end, when the main character, Gabe, begins to self-destruct in earnest, but by then I just yawned and kept asking, "What is he doing now, and why?" Ali has a tendency to digress into lengthy philosophical discussions with little or no bearing on the plot, and then keep hammering long after her character has made his point. She has an almost obsessive fascination with detail--way, way too much detail--which bogs down the plot, such as it is. More than once I seriously considered just casting the book aside and moving on to the next one in my stack. In the end I finished it, but only just.

So my dilemma: How to rate a book that's so obviously flawed but where the author is so obviously talented? If I could give half-stars, this would probably be three and a half, if only in appreciation for Monica Ali's extraordinary way with words and her extensive knowledge of how restaurants work. I haven't read Brick Lane or seen the movie, so I can't speak to whether In the Kitchen is just a sophomore slump. But I will say that she sure could have used a better editor.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Death, June 11, 2009

By	Mary E. Sibley (Carneys Point, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

Gabriel Lightfoot is the executive chef of the restaurant at the Imperial Hotel, London. Yuri, the night porter, a Ukranian, is found dead in the basement of the hotel. It seems Yuri had been living there.

Loneliness killed Yuri Gabe surmises. The Imperial Hotel had been built in 1878. Gabe seeks distraction from the kitchen, an incredibly busy place, with his girlfriend Charlie, a jazz singer.

When Gabriel learns his father has cancer, he visits and discovers his sister Jenny has made a number of complicated arrangements so that his grandmother and his father are visited two times a day by someone. His circumstances are a common enough situation. Gabe left and Jenny stayed and now Gabe is the more valued. The household had been encumbered, in terms of functioning adequately, by the undiagnosed mental illness of one of its members. This is handled delicately by the author.

The book is funny, colorful, picturesque. Perhaps everyone has worked in a kitchen or at least has imagined what it must be like to work in a large, well-staffed kitchen. The one in the story has a number of employees and is capable of turning out many formal meals. In its complexity, hard work, zaniness, and fun one is reminded of the British series, CHEF.

Gabriel is like everyone. He is a lost man and a confused man. He ponders what family loyalty means. He wants to create his own family, but in the turmoil of conflicting emotions he tells a lie and he misses his chance. Near the end of the book he has a panic attack. Subsequently events have a way of emerging like fireworks racing forward. A nice ending gives the reader hope amidst descriptions of institutionalization and exploitation.

This is ripping.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Slow to Start, Preachy, but Overall Worth it, July 14, 2009

By	Danielle Lane (Horseshoe, North Carolina) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

Gabriel Lightfoot is the executive chef at the Imperial Hotel on Piccadilly. The kitchen, well, if you've seen Hell's Kitchen on TV, you have an idea, it's not only a kitchen, it's part nuthouse, too. The staff Gab presides over are immigrants of every stripe and there in lies part of the problem of the first part of this book. The author, IMO, spends too much time on their back story, too much time preaching about the plight of immigrants that it slows the first couple hundred pages or so down.

But that this turns into a whale of a novel, so it's worth it, wading through those pages, or maybe you'll just want to skim them, speed read, whatever.

Gab is 42 and dreams of opening his own place and it looks like his dream is about to come true, but there is a body in the cellar that puts a damper on things and sets Gabs life on a course he couldn't have foreseen. He loses his jazz singing girl over a skinny hooker and now we have a bit of preaching against trafficking, but that's necessary for the story, I guess.

Ms. Ali is a gifted writer, to be sure and I know that fiction is supposed to mirror real life, but perhaps those mirrors are a bit too reflective here. Still, the second half of the book held me in my chair like a magnet.