A vivid chronicle of a rare culinary adventure.
A renowned chef reveals his appetite for risk—and edible insects.
In 2013, Copenhagen’s dining sensation, Noma, hit a serious snag: an outbreak of norovirus that threatened the restaurant’s future and the reputation of its world-famous chef, René Redzepi. When Esquire food and drinks editor Gordinier (X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking, 2008, etc.) met Redzepi in 2014, the chef felt burned out, looking for new inspirations and, as he wrote in his journal, “scared of losing the precious worldwide attention we’d stumbled into.” Eager to reinvent himself and invigorate his cooking, he decided to travel in search of new ideas, and he invited the author to come along to share in and write about the journey. At his own crossroads—depressed over his failing marriage—Gordinier saw Redzepi’s invitation as a gift, a recognition of his talent, and a chance to join the “fierce, focused crew” that made up the chef’s entourage. The search for flavor took the group to Sydney, arctic Norway, Copenhagen, and Mexico, where Redzepi planned a pop-up, Noma Mexico, to investigate “the complexity of Mexican cuisine,” flavors that long had haunted him. The author reports the chef’s ecstatic response to the lush abundance of the markets: tripe, blood sausage, bags of chicken hearts, wild cherries, prickly pears, avocado leaves that smelled like licorice, wondrous tropical fruits, and “galaxies of chiles, oceans of nuts, pyramids of palm sugar, lakes of tamarind paste.” “To watch Redzepi in a Mexican marketplace,” Gordinier writes, “…is like getting a contact high from somebody else’s peyote trip.” Redzepi’s “kinetic fixation on propelling himself forward” characterizes the author’s portrait of him: restless, “allergic to inertia,” easily bored. Whenever Redzepi discovered an unfamiliar ingredient, technique, or custom, he seemed energized by “an electric current.” Kelp, seawort, ant eggs, and grasshoppers are just a few of the ingredients he tried out, which for Redzepi “exemplify all meanings of the word ‘wild’ ”—“flavors and textures of the untamed.”
A vivid chronicle of a rare culinary adventure.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-5964-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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