Word: chefs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...literature of the post-Bourdainian era is vast and unfortunately mostly forgettable (with a few notable exceptions, like Bill Buford's Heat). But to those who crave them, even bad chef memoirs have a certain mesmerizing quality. Take John DeLucie's The Hunger. Unlike Bourdain, DeLucie is not a particularly gifted writer. Also unlike Bourdain, he is annoyingly successful as a chef: he runs Manhattan's sceney Waverly Inn. All the stuff about models hitting on him makes him substantially less relatable...
...crop of chef memoirs includes a rather haughty cooking-school diary (Katherine Darling's Under the Table) and the life and times of a pastry chef (Dalia Jurgensen's Spiced) - naughtier than you'd expect - but the best of them by a mile is by a former chef of no particular distinction named Jason Sheehan, now an extraordinarily good food writer. Cooking Dirty is his account of a career spent largely at what he calls "the low end of the culinary world": late-night shifts at diners, bars and neighborhood joints. Some of it is pure drudgery - like prepping...
...Melting-Pot Kitchen Some of the stuff in Cooking Dirty beggars belief - like the time Sheehan accidentally stuck an 8-in. (20 cm) chef's knife right through his hand, pulled it out and went back to chopping - but so far there has been relatively little actual post-Bourdainian fiction. Possibly the first novel of consequence is Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, set in a hotel restaurant in London. The restaurant's executive chef, Gabriel, has clawed his way up effortfully from the working classes, but having done so, he is now, at 42, having a midlife crisis...
...down like a poorly emulsified vinaigrette, but if you can hack it, then wherever you're from, whatever language you speak, you know where and who you are and what you're doing: you're a saucier, or a sous, or a prep monkey, or a plongeur, or a chef...
...When chef Donald Berger opened his first restaurant in Hanoi six years ago, he chose the unlikely district of West Lake (or, in Vietnamese, Tay Ho). Except for rows of dog-meat restaurants, the area didn't offer much in the way of dining - certainly not of the international variety that foreign residents and travelers were starting to seek out. "There was nothing here," says Berger. "People said I was a moron." But today, West Lake is home to cafés, bars and high-end restaurants - among them top names that have relocated from the chic French Quarter...