The Bobby Gold Stories: A Novel (Bourdain, Anthony. Bobby Gold.) (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Bobby Gold at twenty-one, in a red-and-white Dead Boys T-shirt, blue jeans, high-top Nikes and handcuffs, bent over the hood of the State Police cruiser,..." (more)
Key Phrases: orange suit, green suit, Bobby Gold, Eddie Fish, Bad Bobby (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Author Anthony Bourdain is a talented chef whose two previous thrillers (Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo) were seasoned with the kind of culinary details that delighted the Food Channel-loving fans of his successful nonfiction books. The foodies will slaver over a wonderfully wrought scene in his latest caper novel--it's set at a chic Manhattan restaurant where a gourmand gangster with a picky palate turns the chef's menu upside down and stiffs the poor waiter who has to accommodate him. But the rest of this otherwise slight and unseasoned novel doesn't live up to that wonderful appetizer. Its protagonist is Bobby Gold, an ex-con who works as a security guard at Eddie Fish's Nightclub and is involved with a sexy sous-chef named Nikki whose preparation of a special meal for her lover reads like Bourdain's version of foreplay. But when Nikki rips off the restaurant receipts and Bobby gets on the wrong side of a mob plan to kill Eddie's appetite for good while recouping the money, Bourdain's plotting goes sour and the ending fails to satisfy. Still, it's a nice side dish to go with a good cookbook, or even one of the author's zany true stories of what goes on behind the swinging doors of many real-life restaurants (Kitchen Confidential, A Cook's Tour). --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

With the same explosive energy and irreverent humor with which he described the behind-the-scenes affairs of the restaurant industry in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain revisits some of the themes that made him famous: passion, food and violence. The novel (Bourdain's third, after Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo) tells the story of Bobby Gold, probably the world's most unlikely gangster. A nice Jewish pre-med student implicated in a drug deal gone bad, Bobby goes to prison for 10 years and emerges with an entirely different set of uses for his knowledge of anatomy. Once released, he goes to work for his old friend Eddie Fish, a mobster turned nightclub owner, and falls in love with Nikki, a boisterous sous-chef with dangerous ambitions. Bobby and Nikki get involved in a botched robbery, forcing both to run for their lives. Their seedy shenanigans are wittily chronicled by Bourdain, in his nouveau hard-boiled prose ("'You want truffle jiz? Get your own truffle jiz, cabron' "). In one memorable set piece, Bobby engages in multiple pages of rueful conversation with an old fish wholesaler who's late on a payment to Eddie and knows he's about to be worked over (" `I get to pick the arm?' `Sure,' said Bobby. `Your choice. You pick it' "). Readers will once again be delighted by Bourdain's charming, rugged sensibility, like a modern-day Damon Runyon, and his gourmet blend of wit, suspense and style.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1 edition (May 13, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582342334
• ISBN-13: 978-1582342337
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,083,708 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This is far from Bourdain's best work, October 16, 2003

By	deaner73 (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews

For those of you looking for more in the vein of 'Kitchen Confidential' or 'Cook's Tour,' you may want to skip to the next item on your To-Read list. Anthony Bourdain switches to his fiction hat in his latest outing - a brisk paced read written in minimalist brushstrokes chronicling the adventures of Bobby Gold a tough-as-nails, recently released ex-con who is smitten w/the fetching saute cook at a niteclub/restaurant that he works the security detail on. For fans of hard-boiled crime fiction, this book may leave you feeling a bit unsatisified as the narrative is somewhat lacking in painting pictures of grimy crime worlds, and ingenious criminial schemes, et al. But what Bourdain clearly excels at and ultimately makes this slim-read somewhat worth your while are the moments detailing the inner workings of restaurants and the capturing of colorful banter between chefs, cooks, doing their jobs and talking smack amongst each other.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been great, September 26, 2005

By	Big Daddy Duker (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bobby Gold Stories: A Novel (Paperback)

I was really excited when I started reading this book. The characters were fairly deep and well-developed, and the circumstances were at once amusing and understandable. And then I was halfway through the book and nothing had happened yet. Lo and behold, I finished the book, and still, nothing really happened. There is a rushed bit about robbing a restaurant and running from gangsters, but it all happens so fast that there is no time to really care. The writing is good, the characters are interesting, but this book should have been at least twice as long as it is. In its present form, it reads like a story from a talented writer who realized on Monday night that he had a dealine on Tuesday morning.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Something missing, May 4, 2003

By	IKL (Weehawken, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

I could not wait to get another book from Tony. However, this one seems to be missing something. I liked "Bone In the Throat" and felt that "Gone Bamboo" was good as well. This one, however, seems overwhelmingly simple in comparison. It does have Tony's wit and the food references and the mafia connection but not as many twists and turns as the other two books. We also miss out on the colorful scene descriptions. It's just too simple. If you haven't read Bourdain's fiction yet, start with the other two and then finish off with this one. Tony, I hope the Les Halles cookbook will be better.