Local autograph parties for Kat Flynn, Phoebe Damrosch, Shauna James (with husband Dan Ahern)
On the holiday bookshelf: three first-person, "coming of age" stories by women who were journalists before they became foodies: the chef, the waitress, the survivor.
Kat Flynn leads things off with The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. A journalist and Seattle native, she was working as an editor for an Internet publisher in London, gets laid off, and decides to use her severance pay for tuition at Le Cordon Bleu, the prestigious culinary school in Paris. Her boyfriend soon joins her, and they have a great time learning how to cook. We watch Kat fillet a sea bass, dispatch a live lobster, rip the tendons from a guinea fowl. We watch her drink cold Chablis in an apartment overlooking Paris streets; we watch her sip Champagne at three-star Ledoyen. Living, Kat points out, requires that you taste, taste, taste.
Service Included is subtitled "Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter." Nonsense. Not a single overheard secret makes its way into these pages. Phoebe Damrosch, born into a family of famous writers and musicians, had a Master's in Fine Arts in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence and was living in New York, waiting on tables to support herself. She drools over the French Laundry Cookbook, and when the call comes for front-of-house staff at Thomas Keller's Per Se, she's ready. A full month of rigorous training follows; then the opening is delayed by a kitchen fire. She falls for one of the sommeliers, Andre, whose love of wine and tasting expertise became his ticket out of the slums of New Orleans. Phoebe is quickly promoted to Captain and waits on the New York Times reviewer, Frank Bruni. Four stars! Soon Phoebe and Andre settle into the easy life of restaurant workers: late nights and revelry fueled by relatively large amounts of ready cash. New York Times calls this one of 100 best books of 2007, but it's neither insightful nor enlightening.
My sentimental favorite is Gluten-Free Girl by Seattle writing instructor Shauna James. For the first decades of her life, she's neither all that happy nor all that healthy. One day she hears about a condition called celiac disease: an allergy to gluten. Bingo! Shauna starts a blog, glutenfreegirl.com, which takes an unexpected turn when she starts to date. An optimist, she tattoos "YES" on her wrist. Still, no dice, until the day before her online dating subscription expires, she gets an email from Dan Ahern, executive chef at Impromptu in Madison Park. It's love at first sight. The whole time, she continues writing her blog, occasionally making reference to her friend (now husband), "the Chef." But most of the book, Gluten-Free Girl, is chatty recipes, no doubt helpful for sufferers of celiac disease. I liked the love story that forms the bookends: a lot more interesting, and better written, too.
All three books are lively reads, technically proficient with occasional flashes of charm. But I feel as if I've been speed-dating or snapping up light hors d'oeuvres; superficially satisfying, but not quite enough substance for a complete relationship.
Posted by Ronald Holden at November 29, 2007 10:16 AM | TrackBack
The International Kitchen
Cooking school vacations in Italy, France & Spain.
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