30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASE
Bill Buford founded and ran the British literary magazine Granta for sixteen years and subsequently became fiction editor at The New Yorker. He is therefore not a chef but one of the most accomplished editors of his generation.
He took a leave of absence, began working for free as a kitchen hand at Babbo in New York and stayed considerably longer than he had intended. He then went to Italy and apprenticed himself to a pasta maker in Porretta and to the butcher Dario Cecchini in Panzano, a man who recites Dante while butchering meat.
This is narrative non-fiction rather than a collection of recipes. It depicts life in a restaurant kitchen hour by hour, and it is also funny, which is unusual in the genre.
The restaurant's owner, Mario Batali, was accused of sexual assault in 2017 and withdrew from public life. The book was written eleven years earlier and its portrait of him is warm.
Buford later wrote Dirt, about learning French cooking in Lyon. We stock that too.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 336
Language: English
First published: 2006
The Kitchen Lab Selection
The best account there is of how a professional kitchen actually works, written by someone who could write. That is a rarer combination than it ought to be. A passage about how the kitchen staff function as a single unit, and how the head chef then stands at the pass dripping oil from a small plastic dressing bottle like an artist signing a painting, sums up rather well how we look at food.
