Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage)
by Bill Buford
from Vintage

Editorial Review:

A highly acclaimed writer and editor, Bill Buford left his job at The New Yorker for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, the revolutionary Italian restaurant created and ruled by superstar chef Mario Batali.
Finally realizing a long-held desire to learn first-hand the experience of restaurant cooking, Buford soon finds himself drowning in improperly cubed carrots and scalding pasta water on his quest to learn the tricks of the trade. His love of Italian food then propels him on journeys further afield: to Italy, to discover the secrets of pasta-making and, finally, how to properly slaughter a pig. Throughout, Buford stunningly details the complex aspects of Italian cooking and its long history, creating an engrossing and visceral narrative stuffed with insight and humor.

Bill Buford's funny and engaging book Heat offers readers a rare glimpse behind the scenes in Mario Batali's kitchen. Who better to review the book for Amazon.com, than Anthony Bourdain, the man who first introduced readers to the wide array of lusty and colorful characters in the restaurant business? We asked Anthony Bourdain to read Heat and give us his take. We loved it. So did he. Check out his review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain is host of the Discovery Channel's No Reservations, executive chef at Les Halles in Manhattan, and author of the bestselling and groundbreaking Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, A Cook's Tour, Bone in the Throat, and many others. His latest book, The Nasty Bits will be released on May 16, 2006.
Heat is a remarkable work on a number of fronts--and for a number of reasons. First, watching the author, an untrained, inexperienced and middle-aged desk jockey slowly transform into not just a useful line cook--but an extraordinarily knowledgable one is pure pleasure. That he chooses to do so primarily in the notoriously difficult, cramped kitchens of New York's three star Babbo provides further sado-masochistic fun. Buford not only accurately and hilariously describes the painfully acquired techniques of the professional cook (and his own humiations), but chronicles as well the mental changes--the "kitchen awareness" and peculiar world view necessary to the kitchen dweller. By end of book, he's even talking like a line cook.

Secondly, the book is a long overdue portrait of the real Mario Batali and of the real Marco Pierre White--two complicated and brilliant chefs whose coverage in the press--while appropriately fawning--has never described them in their fully debauched, delightful glory. Buford has--for the first time--managed to explain White's peculiar--almost freakish brilliance--while humanizing a man known for terrorizing cooks, customers (and Batali). As for Mario--he is finally revealed for the Falstaffian, larger than life, mercurial, frighteningly intelligent chef/enterpreneur he really is. No small accomplishment. Other cooks, chefs, butchers, artisans and restaurant lifers are described with similar insight.

Thirdly, Heat reveals a dead-on understanding--rare among non-chef writers--of the pleasures of "making" food; the real human cost, the real requirements and the real adrenelin-rush-inducing pleasures of cranking out hundreds of high quality meals. One is left with a truly unique appreciation of not only what is truly good about food--but as importantly, who cooks--and why. I can't think of another book which takes such an unsparing, uncompromising and ultimately thrilling look at the quest for culinary excellence. Heat brims with fascinating observations on cooking, incredible characters, useful discourse and argument-ending arcania. I read my copy and immediately started reading it again. It's going right in between Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Zola's The Belly of Paris on my bookshelf. --Anthony Bourdain

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Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• Great read - even for non-cooksI
  I really don't cook but this is one of the top "passion for food vs. inside the food business" books out there, e.g Kitchen Confidential style. This, like the others, is fantastically interesting and fun to read. Mario Batalli features prominently in this book - and it's biographical in that regard - but it's also so much more. The subtitle is spot on as it reads as a true adventure story involving (mostly italian) food, fun and intricacies, and the people involved in it's growing, processing, creation, and... more info

• A amazing journey through food and cooking
  In the last few years I have gotten really interested in food and cooking, and I have to say that having read dozens of great cookbooks and memoirs, this one stands out in my mind.
  The author, a longtime food enthusiast and home cook, meets famed chef Mario Batali by chance at a dinner party and the chance encounter inspires him to write a series of articles about life in New York's acclaimed Babbo Restaurant. Working as a kitchen slave for Batali, Buford is by turns disastrous and hilarious, but the... more info

• You Need to Love the Kitchen
  I love this book. If I could get my wife to read it, she would have lasted 10 pages. If you don't love to cook, love to experiment in the kitchen or love to eat at and critque fine restaurants, you might not understand this book. I finished this book wishing I could trade places with Buford. If you're a guy who would rather go to Lowe's instead of a kitchen supply store, this is probably not for you.

• Outsider Looking In
  I've been a fairly faithful watcher of Top Chef, and a recent one of other restaurant/food based reality tv shows. I wondered if the kitchens were really as sexist as they were made out to be. I wondered how it was so "easy" to get meals brought out in 20 - 30 minutes. Those questions and more get answered. For example, I decided to make braised short ribs based on a Top Chef recipe and one of them ended up looking all weird and alien-like. I wasn't sure why it happened since the others were fine. This book... more info