books – Page 16 – Sheryl Kirby

Order Up

With all the hype about celebrity chefs these days, we tend to overlook one very important component of any restaurant crew – the server. While cheffing is most definitely hard work, it can pay off in cookbooks, endorsement deals, TV shows or at the very least, chef groupies.

No fame and fortune awaits the humble server – the front line contact for any restaurant meal. Yes, servers generally get paid better than kitchen staff, but they’re also the ones who are forced to navigate the choppy waters of unruly customers and egotistical chefs.

Phoebe Damrosch’s Service Included tells the tale of a server at Thomas Keller’s New York restaurant Per Se, dishing the dirt on the goings on front of house where so many others have written about what goes on behind the pass.

While this is Damrosch’s own story, based on her experiences as a server, it is actually the personal bits that drag the book down.

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This Town Is Our Town, It Is So Glamorous

I wonder how Joe Fiorito would feel about me using a line from a Go-Go’s song as the title of a post about his book. He’d probably think it was amusing, think I was a character and would sit down and ask me many questions and then write about me, adding me to his list of interesting people who make Toronto what it is.

If the name Joe Fiorito is familiar to you, you’re likely a reader of the Toronto Star, where Fiorito has had a column for the past few years. I read his work regularly because he seems like a very genuine person who truly cares about the people he interviews, and in part, because he lives in my neighbourhood and can often be found expounding on why Parkdale gets a bum rap.

Fiorito’s book Union Station is a collection of essays on the human condition as seen in this, the centre of the universe, Toronto. Collections of essays on the human condition are a dime a dozen – every writer has a pile of half-finished character sketches of a neighbour or a professor or a particularly memorable blind date. But Joe Fiorito’s ouevre is not just that he is able to write about the people he encounters, but he is able to do so with such insight that it pulls at the heartstrings. Without being sappy.

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Alice in Wonderland

I once worked for a woman who was a whirlwind. Driven, creative, incredibly knowledgeable in her field, kind as can be, she nevertheless drove me and every other person who worked for her right around the bend. She was one of those folks who took on more and more work, spreading herself too thin, ignoring her family and friends. More importantly, she would swoop in, critiquing things that that we thought were fine, rearranging things that didn’t need rearranging, and generally leaving a path of chaos and destruction in her wake. She once pulled me from the sales floor on an excruciatingly busy afternoon so I could do her personal mending, leaving an inexperienced clerk to deal with a Saturday afternoon crowd, and prohibiting me from supplementing my pay with the commission I’d have made on the stuff I’d have sold had I not been hemming her skirt.

This is the impression I have of Alice Waters.

From its humble beginnings, Chez Panisse has been Alice Waters’ restaurant, but by impression only. She has never been the sole owner, and is in fact, one person on a board of directors. She has never been the main chef, although she would fill in when the place was between regular chefs, and she has always had full creative control of the menu. She has never been the manager of the place, leaving that task to a string of people, including her father, who were all faced with the task of forcing a bunch of flaky hippies to adhere to basic accounting systems. Which can’t help but provoke the question – what exactly is it that Alice Waters does at Chez Panisse?

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Slave to the Kitchen

You’ve gotta have a lot of respect, and a healthy does of fear, for someone who can make Gordon Ramsay cry. Anyone who has spent hours watching Hell’s Kitchen wondering where the hell Ramsay learned to run a kitchen like THAT can look no further than his teacher and mentor, Marco Pierre White.

The original enfant terrible chef, White tells his tale in an autobiography entitled White Slave. The product of an Italian mother who passed away when he was very young and a perfectionist father who was also a chef, White was driven early on to become the best chef in the UK. He racked up Michelin stars, wives and restaurants.

White Slave details White’s childhood struggling with dyslexia (the book was “ghost” written by James Steen), his early days in the kitchen, his various romances and his philosophy for running a kitchen. He became notorious for kicking out customers who complained about any aspect of their meal, often with a system in which the front of house staff completely cleared the table, including tablecloth, and left the customers sitting there, speechless. His drive and perfectionism were passed on to his proteges such as Ramsay, Mario Batali and others.

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Turning the Tables

I’ve had this book sitting on my desk for so long that I’ve partially forgotten what the damn thing’s about. But it’s been sitting here because I’ve been meaning to write about it, because I not only enjoyed it but found it incredibly useful. Food bloggers will likely recognize the name Steven Shaw as the founder of eGullet, the foodie website.

As a restaurant critic and food writer, Shaw shares his insight into the restaurant biz with chapters on everything from how to get a reservation, everything you needed to know about the Open Table system – live in fear people, Open Table is like identity theft for diners – plus how a restaurant kitchen is run, and even how the supply chains work.

As an internet foodie himself, Shaw also has strong feelings in support of food bloggers and discusses how the internet is changing everything about food writing. He also looks at the changing evolution of the restaurant business, from a shift to high-end cuisine to chefs like Tom Collicchio opening sandwich chains, or the creation of a restaurant from scratch such as Grant Achatz’s Alinea.

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Review – Comfort Food For Break-Ups

comfortfoodforbreakups Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl
Marusya Bociurkiw
Arsenal Pulp Press

There is a time, immediately after the breakup of a relationship with a serious other when we all seem to require comfort food. Ice cream, cake, mashed potatoes, something in which to drown our sorrows, that reminds us of better, safer times when we were not so vulnerable and hurt.

Comfort food can be anything that reminds us of someone we love, whether it’s the safety of a childhood home, or the memory of a loved one who has passed. Regardless of our culture, food is woven into the fabric of our lives and every dish, every forkful evokes memories.

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If this is the Gospel of Food, Maybe that Explains Why I’m Not Religious

You know how you can go through life believing and trusting someone until you catch them, maybe not in an outright lie, but in a tiny fib, or an omission, and then everything after that is tainted with confusion as you try to determine just how honest they’re being?

Thus is my relationship with author Barry Glassner and his book The Gospel of Food.

Glassner attempts to debunk a variety of theories and commonly held opinions and beliefs about food and eating, and for the most part, he writes a well-thought-out argument in which he supports his claims. When it suits him. That is, he tends not to bring up any documentation that might refute his claims, which makes me question not just the issues in dispute, but everything he writes.

I can agree with his opening claim that people who enjoy what they eat have more joyful lives overall, as opposed to people who deny themselves real food on the pretense of health or dieting. In the chapter False Prophets he references writer Emily Green who has written against non-fat dairy products and similar items which she refers to as “nonundelows” for their prefixes of non-, un- de- or low-; foods that have been modified to have their nutritional value, fat, calories etc., removed.

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If you Can’t Stand the Heat

Bill Buford hurts my head. That’s really my first thought when I try to size up the book Heat, An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.

He hurts my head because he may well be obsessive-compulsive, and the book is really the literary equivalent of a man obsessed, grabbing the reader by the hand and dragging them off on some wild goose chase in search of knowledge that no one cares about. Well, except Bill Buford.

I’m guessing that most people picked this book up because of Buford’s links to celebrity chef Mario Batali. Buford convinces the chef to give him what is basically an apprenticeship (Bill works for free to learn the ropes) in his flagship restaurant Babbo, and the writer documents his journey through the back of house. There are a few dirt-digging scenes to keep the Batali fans amused; one describes Batali digging through the garbage bin and pulling up celery tops and peelings, insisting they can be used for a soup; but the story is ultimately about Buford himself.

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The Words “Author” and “Great Cook” are not Synonymous

Note to self – check the publication date on books you borrow from the library. Sometimes you just don’t want to go there.

This note to self is provoked by a recent library acquisition that wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. The Great Canadian Literary Cookbook, while definitely Canadian, in a way only Canadians can be, is unfortunately, not Great. Not by a long shot.

I grabbed this book originally because I thought it would be a bit more… literary, in its content. I’ve had an idea to create an anthology of food memoirs by Canadian authors and sort of expected this would be along those lines. And certainly, there are some great food-related books by Canadian authors out there – Austin Clarke, for instance.

Let me start from the beginning. Every year in Sechelt, British Columbia, Canadian writers and readers come together for The Festival of the Written Arts. It’s now called the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, and no, I don’t know where Sechelt, BC, is exactly, although somewhere along the BC coast is my best guess. After one festival the organizers came up with the idea to do a cookbook with contributions from festival participants. In 1994, they published the cookbook.

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The Making of a Chef

First, a disclaimer. The content of this post is not intended to sound pretentious or condescending. It is not my intention to look down on the home cook (I am one myself), or to sneer at people who have not gone through a culinary arts programme. I’ve always hated when people with university degrees look down on tradespeople, and it’s very easy for people with professional training to look down on home cooks.

Which is why I’m not recommending Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef to anyone.

Oh, it’s not that it isn’t a great book – it is. But it would be like me trying to sit down and real a programmer’s handbook. Or a book of Latin. Most of what Ruhlman discusses in this book about his time at the Culinary Institute of America would appear to anyone who hasn’t trained professionally or worked in a professional kitchen to be in a completely different language.

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