A glowing homage best suited to patrons of the esteemed New York restaurant it portrays.
In this clubby portrait, a novelist and journalist seeks to understand what makes one of her favorite restaurants a New York institution.
Opened in 1997, Balthazar is notable for both its longevity and its function as a kind of buzzy community center for a certain strata of Manhattanites. A Balthazar regular, Nadelson (Manhattan 62, 2014, etc.) brings her fine observational skills to an investigation of what makes it the quintessential New York restaurant. Her method is to accumulate detail, and so we learn everything from the biography of the immigrant owner of the SoHo building to what the kitchen served neighbors in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In between, we get fleeting profiles not just of restaurateur Keith McNally, but of the Mexican busser who refills morning coffee, the chef who oversees the 1,500 meals a day that come out of the kitchen, the reservationist, the bartender, and even the farmer who grows the potatoes for the restaurant’s renowned pommes frites. We listen to celebrity regulars like chef David Chang gush about the oysters and watch the painstaking work of Balthazar’s servers, cooks, porters, and pastry chefs. However, this is not a Kitchen Confidential–style exposé of the sometimes-rollicking, sometime-harsh realities of restaurant life. At Balthazar, it seems, the frisee aux lardons is always delicious, the customers are unerringly sophisticated and considerate, and the employees—all 250 of them—are uniformly gracious and unflappable. Yet the mises-en-scène never fully come together in a coherent story. Although the Balthazar that Nadelson describes seems like a lovely place to eat, the net effect of all that gentle characterization and warming praise is to make both restaurant and book seem self-congratulatory and insular. Without a strong narrative arc or clear argument, the book doesn’t offer much sustenance to readers who haven’t dined there.
A glowing homage best suited to patrons of the esteemed New York restaurant it portrays.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1677-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
