Well-written and fascinating, though its appeal may be limited to the terminally food-obsessed.
An insider’s look at the first two years of Per Se, Thomas Keller’s New York complement to his legendary Napa Valley restaurant, French Laundry.
“The secret to service is not servitude, but anticipating desire,” Damrosch learned. She was a novice when she scored a pre-opening interview with Chef Keller and landed a job as backserver, pouring water, serving bread, setting and clearing for each course, among other things. Soon she was on the fast track and in 2004 became Per Se’s first female captain, the person who greets diners, takes their orders, sells and serves the wine and presents the check at the end of the meal. Damrosch acknowledges that the delights she chronicles are not for the budget-conscious: Per Se’s tasting menus start at $250 per person, and at one point she mentions two brothers spending “their usual $20,000 on a few bottles.” In some justification of the steep cost, she notes that if four guests at one table each have different menus, this could mean 20 or so courses and close to 80 different dishes, and that Per Se’s menu and attention to detail have made it one of only five four-star restaurants in New York City. Mouthwatering descriptions of the exotic fare may persuade skeptics that it’s worth the money. Of the custard course, Damrosch writes, “My favorite, the deviled egg with a truffle ‘Pop-Tart,’ looked exactly like the picnic food and toaster treat except that the pastry was filled with a marmalade of Périgord truffles and drizzled with truffle frosting.” Other topics include the author’s romance with a sexy sommelier and the staff’s downtime activities: a late-night excursion to find the city’s best bone marrow, for instance, or a weekend spent at a Vermont dairy farm learning about cheese in order to better serve their customers.
Well-written and fascinating, though its appeal may be limited to the terminally food-obsessed.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-122814-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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