Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

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• ISBN13: 9781400041206
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
testAmazon.com Review
Bill Buford’s amusing and engaging book Heat offers readers a rare glimpse behind the scenes in Mario Batali’s kitchen. Who better to review the book for Amazon.com, than Anthony Bourdain, the man who first introduced readers to the wide array of lusty and colorful characters in the restaurant business? We questioned Anthony Bourdain to read Heat and give us his take. We loved it. So did he. Check out his review not more than. –Daphne Durham

Anthony Bourdain is host of the Discovery Channel’s No Reservations, executive chef at Les Halles in Manhattan, and leader of the bestselling and groundbreaking Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook, A Cook’s Tour, Bone in the Throat, and many others. His latest book, The Grave Bits will be unrestricted on May 16, 2006.

Heat is a remarkable work on a number of fronts–and for a number of reasons. First, watching the leader, an untrained, inexperienced and middle-aged desk jockey slowly transform into not just a useful line cook–but an extraordinarily knowledgable one is pure pleasure. That he chooses to do so primarily in the notoriously hard, cramped kitchens of New York’s three star Babbo provides further sado-masochistic fun. Buford not only accurately and hilariously describes the painfully bought techniques of the professional cook (and his own humiations), but chronicles as well the mental changes–the “kitchen awareness” and peculiar world view necessary to the kitchen dweller. By end of book, he’s even talking like a line cook.

Secondly, the book is a long overdue portrait of the real Mario Batali and of the real Marco Pierre White–two intricate and brilliant chefs whose coverage in the press–while appropriately fawning–has never described them in their fully debauched, delightful glory. Buford has–for the first time–managed to clarify White’s peculiar–nearly freakish brilliance–while humanizing a man known for terrorizing cooks, customers (and Batali). As for Mario–he is finally revealed for the Falstaffian, larger than life, mercurial, frighteningly intelligent chef/enterpreneur he really is. No tiny accomplishment. Additional cooks, chefs, butchers, artisans and restaurant lifers are described with similar insight.

Thirdly, Heat reveals a dead-on understanding–rare among non-chef writers–of the pleasures of “building” food; the real human cost, the real supplies and the real adrenelin-rush-inducing pleasures of cranking out hundreds of high quality meals. One is left with a truly unique appreciation of not only what is truly excellent about food–but as importantly, who cooks–and why. I can’t reflect of another book which takes such an unsparing, uncompromising and ultimately thrilling look at the quest for culinary excellence. Heat brims with fascinating observations on cooking, incredible characters, useful discourse and argument-ending arcania. I read my copy and immediately ongoing reading it again. It’s going right in between Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Zola’s The Belly of Paris on my bookshelf. –Anthony Bourdain