In the Kitchen: A Novel [Paperback]

Monica Ali (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 2010

Monica Ali, nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has written a follow-up to Brick Lane that further establishes her as one of England’s most compelling and original voices.

Gabriel Lightfoot, an enterprising man from a northern English mill town, is making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, he aims to run a tight kitchen. Though he’s under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberantly multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own, all Gabe’s hard work looks set to pay off.

Until, that is, a worker is found dead in the kitchen’s basement. It is a small death, a lonely death—but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe’s life.

Enter Lena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. Under her spell, Gabe makes a decision, the consequences of which strip him naked and change the course of the life he knows—and the future he thought he wanted.

With prose that "crackles with verve and vivacity" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and "a truly Dickensian cast of characters" (The Buffalo News), Ali’s "portrait of a middle-aged Holden Caulfield wandering the streets" (The Plain Dealer) is a sheer pleasure to read.

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).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.”
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (May 11, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416571698
• ISBN-13: 978-1416571698
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,050,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She has been named by Granta as one of the twenty best young British novelists. She is the author of the novel Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is now a major motion picture, and Alentejo Blue, a story collection. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 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
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: In the Kitchen: A Novel (Hardcover)

(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.

12 of 14 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
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: In the Kitchen: A Novel (Hardcover)

(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 A Good Story, but Ultimately You May Not Have Any Pity For Gabe Whatsoever, July 13, 2009

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the Kitchen: A Novel (Hardcover)

Monica Ali's third novel, IN THE KITCHEN, is her best book yet. It revolves around an aspiring executive chef, Gabriel Lightfoot, depicted as a troubled man who can never quite get a hold of that dream he is forever chasing. The story opens with a bang, when one of Gabe's co-workers is found dead in the basement of the kitchen. No one is sure if foul play was involved. Why was he even down there in the first place? The clues to this mystery point to the possibility that Yuri was living in the basement and was not alone.

The only other clue is Lena, an unkempt surly Belorussian with a very mysterious past, who has ties to Yuri but no one knows how. Lena is not talking to anyone and refuses to give Gabe any answers. The only thing he knows is that she is an employee working under him, and for reasons even he cannot explain, he is compelled to seek her out after she is let go from her job. He becomes obsessed with Yuri's death, which leads to an obsession with Lena, despite the fact that he already has a girlfriend in what seems to be a rock solid relationship. Against his better judgment, Gabe promptly offers his apartment to Lena when his girlfriend is out of town, and one wonders what his true motives are.

What the reader assumes will be a murder mystery turns into a psychological study of a man whose life slowly falls apart before our eyes. As Gabe broods over the mystery of Yuri's death, he is also dealing with a dying father, which forces him to delve into his childhood, trying to understand what happened in the past that created the strained relationship he has with his father today. His almost naïve unconditional love for his deceased mother and memories of her eventually lead him to things he never understood about her or was even aware were happening.

He is distant with his immediate family, but is forced to acknowledge that his father is ill, thus bringing him back into contact with a sister he no longer recognizes, a father who has remained a distant figure due to some event in Gabe's childhood, and a grandmother who is in desperate need of a caretaker 24/7. And on top of it all, Gabe still must address the fact that he can't seem to get rid of Lena, who is now living in his apartment, and his girlfriend has returned from her trip. There are only so many lies he can keep straight.

Readers may find Gabriel a very unlikable character, but it can't be denied that Monica Ali has successfully written a complex character study that will force one to read the book to the very last page. I, for one, just had to learn how everything turned out for him. His life is in total disarray because of one seemingly random event. When you think Gabe has hit rock bottom, think again; it actually gets worse. One can't help but feel sorry for him, but at the same time, he made the choices that brought all this upon him. IN THE KITCHEN is a good story, but ultimately you may not have any pity for Gabe whatsoever.

--- Reviewed by Marie Hashima Lofton