You Need to Love the Kitchen
I love Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage). If I could get my wife to read it, she would have lasted 10 pages. If you don't love to cook, love to experiment in the kitchen or love to eat at and critque fine restaurants, you might not understand Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage). I finished Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage) wishing I could trade places with Buford. If you're a guy who would rather go to Lowe's instead of a kitchen supply store, this is probably not for you.
Outsider Looking In
I've been a fairly faithful watcher of Top Chef, and a recent one of other restaurant/food based reality tv shows. I wondered if the kitchens were really as sexist as they were made out to be. I wondered how it was so "easy" to get meals brought out in 20 - 30 minutes. Those questions and more get answered. For example, I decided to make braised short ribs based on a Top Chef recipe and one of them ended up looking all weird and alien-like. I wasn't sure why it happened since the others were fine. Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage) explains it.
Bill Buford relays his misadventures with humor, very often at his own expense. I haven't read any of his other works so I'm not sure if it's his style of writing or if was lucky to be aware of how he looked ... Read More
banjo
Very good biography! One has to be interested in cooking and food. AT parts more detail than I want to know, but the book is fascinating, educational and humourous. Highly recomend it.
Apprentice of apprentices
Anyone who has ever worked at a continental-style restaurant should read Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage).
I picked up "Heat" in the interests of reliving my experiences in two continental restaurants, run by two totally different-in-temperament chefs, one Austrian, one Swiss. Neither one embodies quite the insanity exhibited by Mario Batali, the owner/operator of Babbo in New York City,and known via TV as The Iron Chef. I must confess I have never watched The Iron Chef, although I have heard of him; but most of what goes on here does not impact him in that show.
Mr Buford, who seems to have had an open-ended commitment with his real job at the New York Times, decides upon interviewing and further visiting with Mario Batali, that he would like ... Read More
Diversionary but not fascinating
In reading through the 1 star reviews, I'm awfully confused. There's not much "foul" language, particularly if you contrast it with Bourdain's books. I'm 7/8 of the way through and can't think of anything other than a very few sprinkled f-bombs at all. For the folks who complain about the lack of an in-depth look at French food and life in France - well, its title is pretty much the major clue - pasta and Tuscany don't scream French cuisine. I'm constantly amazed at people's ability to complain. That said, I enjoyed it but it's not a great book. It offers one person's experiences in a celebrity driven kitchen (I've never watched Mario Batali on TV and I am less likely to now) and in some other settings. I never caught his passion for cooking - it ... Read More
