Heat

“History always teaches us we can't turn back the clock, but I seem to have been surrounded by people who kept trying.”

I've said this before on other food-related books I've read and reviewed: I'm not a chef. I'm not even a cook, really, because the best my culinary skills can claim is the ability to follow a recipe. I'm an avid watcher of food shows, though, and am familiar with so many different chefs (celebrity and otherwise), ingredients, and the food industry as a whole. I picked this up because a friend of mine mentioned really enjoying it when she read it last year, and I do so love my food books.

I absolutely loved the humor and the dedication the author has for his sudden career change and desperation to make it work in a kitchen of chefs. You need to be a special sort of person to work in a kitchen and not become an alcoholic drug addict whose personality disorders are on display. After a late in life change in careers, he starts at the bottom in Batali's Babbo and provides us with a glimpse into life there. After working his way up and befriending the people around him, he then embarks on a culinary sabbatical of sorts, working his way through Italy and picking up pointers from the people that make real honest-to-god Italian food. It's a really good read, and though I see several people here saying their favorite parts surrounded Batali and Babbo, I actually had a great time reading about the author's time in Italy. Dario sounds like a trip and a half, and I giggled a lot at the mental image of the bull being brought into that small Italian village.

The elephant in the room here is the author's description of Mario Batali. He's a deeply unlikeable guy by all accounts here, and the handwavy thing to do is chalk it up to “that's just the restaurant industry”. He comes off as being offensive, being a drunk, a lush, and extremely misogynistic. Despite the scenes this comes up in, I still walked away from this book really enjoying what I read.

I really recommend this to people who enjoy food, who enjoy restaurant stories, who enjoy Italian food, and who enjoy a lot of humor in their books.