Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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270 of 279 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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90 of 96 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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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mostly entertaining but not satiating, June 5, 2007
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.
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