HUNGER LIKE A THIRST

A meld of autobiography and culinary memoir with meat on its bones.

“I’m not sure on which planet I belong,” says Rodell in the closing pages of this consistently engaging chronicle of her life so far. And the statement is understandable: Though the James Beard Award–winning food writer, editor, and restaurant critic is back home in her native Australia, she spent many of her formative years finding her way and forging a career in the U.S., with which she harbors a conflicted relationship. Formerly a critic for Creative Loafing, LA Weekly, the New York Times, and Food & Wine magazine, Rodell is today the rather less peripatetic restaurant critic at the Age in Melbourne. She cut her teeth in the restaurant trade in America and retains a keen understanding of the camaraderie (and brutalities) experienced by its workers. Often joyous, sometimes melancholy, her first book recounts a lifelong hunger for discovery and meaning, with exceptional food as both focal point and an end in itself. She provides observant capsule histories of the landscape relating to food and service, all while charting the rise of the contemporary dining craze and celebrity chefs. Also on the menu are recollections of financial struggle and sexism, marriage and motherhood, the stew of guilt and Lucullan pleasures that accompany a life on the road, the delights of cocktail culture, the origins of the American hospitality ethos, a billet-doux to Melbourne, and a reflection on the late Anthony Bourdain. Her incisive writing, which chooses to reveal the cultural and historic backstories of the cuisines and locales she reviews, is what makes her work so distinctive. But above all, it is Rodell’s candor, her gift for asking so many savory, enlightening questions, that rewards the reader’s palate.

Structured like a good meal, or a good review, rendering a superb memoir.