A colorful yet rambling history of transformations in the food world.
A back-of-the-house, behind-the-scenes look at new restaurants and passionate chefs.
Making his book debut, James Beard Award–winning food journalist Alexander offers an energetic, scattered chronicle of the food world from 2006 to 2017, a decade, he asserts, when “independent, chef-owned, casual fine-dining restaurants” created a culinary revolution. He locates the revolution’s birth in Portland, Oregon, where a young chef named Gabriel Rucker opened a small restaurant, Le Pigeon, generating hype that “morphed from local buzz into a national fever pitch,” putting Rucker—and Portland—on the map of culinary stardom. Rucker, writes the author, invented a new aesthetic: “the mismatched chairs, the Goodwill plates and silverware, the lack of tablecloths,” along with “scratch-kitchen-level food made by hand using local ingredients.” Rucker is one among the many individuals Alexander profiles, gleaned from nearly 100 interviews with cooks, chefs, and bartenders whose ambitions, challenges, successes, and failures add up to “a mosaic of the last decade’s sprawling, mercurial, pyrotechnically creative culinary ecosystem.” There’s Tom Colicchio, who learned how to cook by working at top New York restaurants. At 26, he earned a three-star review from the New York Times, soon opened Gramercy Tavern with prominent restaurateur Danny Meyer, and went on to establish his own restaurant, Craft, “radical in its simplicity.” When reality TV producers wanted a chef to judge a food competition show, Colicchio was high on the list; the show was Top Chef. There’s Anjan and Emily Mitra, who struggled to open an Indian restaurant in San Francisco and ended up so overwhelmed by their success that they lost sight of their original motivation to share the texture, balance, and “crazy versatility of flavors” of South Indian food. There’s Phil Ward, innovator of the craft cocktail movement that spread across the country. Alexander’s choice of characters seems random, and their stories, though engaging, don’t cohere into an overarching analysis. Initially claiming that the revolution is over, the author concludes that “a fresh torch” is likely to be lit.
A colorful yet rambling history of transformations in the food world.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55802-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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