Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Izak (Illustrator)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Cooking for Mr. Latte is a delightfully modern dating story, recipes included. It's the true story of the courtship between Amanda Hesser, a food writer for The New York Times and author of the award-winning cookbook The Cook and the Gardener, and writer Tad Friend, the titular Mr. Latte. Most of the book was written in installments for the New York Times Magazine, but fans of Hesser's writing will be happy to know that there are plenty of new stories and recipes to justify picking up the book version. Her tale ends happily ever after, but has enough ups and downs to keep it interesting. And it's not all about Mr. Latte. Ever wonder what it's like to eat out with foodie guru Jeffrey Steingarten? Chances are you guessed wrong.

Food is an important aspect of Hesser's life (though it wasn't for Mr. Latte when they met, making for some of the downs in the ups and downs), but it's not until you notice how seamlessly Hesser weaves her meals into her story that you realize how much of our lives and our memories revolve around food. By the time you get to the recipes, you've already salivated over the dishes and become emotionally attached to them. From her mother's Chocolate Dump-It Cake to the Ginger Duck her future mother-in-law made the first time they met, you'll love that Hesser pays such close attention and generously shares the recipes. Filled with everything from old-fashioned treats from her grandmother's kitchen to dishes from some of New York's hottest dining spots, this is one entertaining read that is sure to end up in your kitchen. --Leora Y. Bloom

Review

A love affair with food: tender, wry, playful, truthful. To read Hesser's prose is to hunger for more. -- Nigella Lawson, author of Forever Summer, Nigella Bites, How to Eat, and How to be a Domestic Goddess

Recipes, restaurant critiques, and food lore —all agreeably season New York Times food writer Hesser's beguiling story. -- Kirkus Reviews

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Complete Numbers Starting with 1, 1st Ed edition (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039305196X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393051964
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (83 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #641,518 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Foodie Barbie's Dream Book: Class Dismissed, June 25, 2003

By	constantreader (San Antonio TX) - See all my reviews

The hot-pink title should be a tip-off: What might we deduce about the taste level of someone who would name a fluffy cookbook/memoir in reference to an earlier book ("Looking for Mr. Goodbar") about the murder of a lonely crippled woman?
Nonetheless, this is a physically attractive, if precious little book, with its chick-lit cover, rosy endpapers and the '50s-style line drawings that make everyone look impossibly pretty, thin, rich and happy. Like the '50s women's-magazine ads they evoke, the drawings seem to have created an alternate reality -- not quite the right tone for something that purports to be autobiography, interrupted with recipes.
I can't help comparing this book with the late Laurie Colwin's two memoir/cookbooks. Like Colwin's books, this one gives personal tips on how to cook dishes that have worked for the author, setting them in a context of entertaining family and friends through various life passages. The reason novelist Colwin's food-focused books worked for me and this one didn't, though, are the ingredients Hesser leaves out, as much as those she puts in. There's a little too much about her personal life not to have put in a little more. For instance, she hints at a class gap between her family of origins and her husband's (struggling single mom vs. college president and his hostess wife), but she won't quite go the distance and tell us how she feels about that.
There's a lot about her food-snob criticisms of her husband-to-be's eating habits, but one wonders if she ever felt any insecurity about the background gap. How she jumped the class fences would be intriguing, but she doesn't tell us how she got to train as a cook in France, nor how she got to write for the NYT while still in her 20. Either would be more interesting than her vacillations between a wedding dress from Valentino vs. one by Prada.
More fascinating are the occasional glimpses into her rather steely careerist side, and it's hard to tell if she's conscious of a rather nasty habit of biting the hand that fed her. As a young factotum for a French restaurateur, she once picked up Julia Child at Orly airport. During a drive and a lunch, she doesn't seem to have had any shop talk with one of the first American women to popularize the art of fine cooking, but shows Child as the loopy, "Saturday Night Live" caricature of herself, smiling dimwittedly at hostile French teens as the only elderly person eating at their hangout. Other food critics are kicked in the teeth for their pretensions, though it's not made clear why they are less palatable than the author's own.
There's a partial exposure of Hesser's family that reminds me of Martha Stewart's soft-focus presentation of her Polish-American family. You get the family recipes, but no sense of how these people feel, think or live their daily lives. In a particularly mean scene,"Mr. Latte" mocks the author's grandmother's npn-standard pronunciation of the word "terrible" to Hesser's apparent amusement.
I put this book down twice, but sucked up the smarminess to keep browsing through the recipes, some of which at least sound good. (Others, influenced by the gimmicky restaurants she covers, sound like a clash of too many random flavors.)I wish, though, that she had told a story worthy of her rather tough, direct style. This book -- pictures, pink and all -- is just too cute for words.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very tedious, July 15, 2005

By	RNS (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes (Paperback)

This book starts out promising--a love story of mismatched opposites. After the first 2 chapters, however, it turns into the diary of a snobby New York elitist. The amount of detail she would like the readers to care about concerning the most mundane experiences in her life is intolerable. She simultaneously derides American cuisine while saying that her family's "lobster shaped meatloaf" is the best. Her future in-laws seem to be the best cooks on the planet, which seems like pure pandering. Her absolute fascination with "Europe" (by which she means France and Italy) and her frustrations with taking her maladroit family members there is a tired cliche. The fact that she is so embarrassed at their behavior shows her to be spoiled. The recipes are mostly, if not all, culled from other sources. Thankfully, it is a light read, and the impressions it gives will not linger upon you.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Started well but disappointed, September 20, 2004

By	Rebecca Heath (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I had high hopes when I picked up this book - catchy title, recipes intertwined in the story line - these things seemed to bode well. I like to eat and was looking forward to reading about food and maybe picking up a few recipes. Unfortunately, I am not a gourmet and I live in "fly-over" land. The restaurant name-dropping means nothing to me and I do not walk to the grocery store to buy Meyer lemons and sea salt. The more I read of this book, the less I cared. Out of the whole book, there was only one recipe I wanted to try and that was for the meatloaf, but even then I don't seriously think that I will try to shape it into a lobster... I am positive that there are people out there who will enjoy this book, but unfortunately, I am not one of them. Thank goodness I can return it to the library.