A wide-ranging, toothsome smorgasbord of Gotham's good eats and the tireless men and women behind each plate.
Exuberant New York chefs and restaurateurs share their culinary histories.
Initially inspired by a conversation with an Upper West Side butcher, Yalof (Straight From The Heart: Letters of Hope and Inspiration from Survivors of Breast Cancer, 1997, etc.) began researching the “gastronomic landscape of New York City” throughout its five distinct boroughs. Eschewing the popular go-to dining destinations with their in-house “rock-star chefs,” the author canvassed chefs and shop owners of some newer and less-well-known establishments representative of the region’s diversity. Each interviewee generously shares his or her diverse background and offers unique and educative perspectives on taste, ingredients, and service experiences. An opening section on food-centered grass-roots businesses celebrates immigrant purveyors from Croatia, France, Greece, and Poland who all share a passion for hard work and flavorful delicacies both sweet and savory from their native lands. Personality and humor shine brightly throughout these essays, especially in the stories of Charlie Sahadi’s years curating a Middle Eastern deli, “entertainologist” Lulu Powers’ first catering blunders, and young cook MacKenzie Arrington’s insightful restaurant coming-of-age. Others highlight the business end of the food industry—e.g., Louisiana-born praline perfectionist Lauren Clark, who ponders the necessary transitions small ventures must make to stay profitable or food truck vendors like The Halal Guys, who prize cleanliness, word-of-mouth advertising, and the principle of the happy customer. From the oldest Chinese restaurant in New York to a Rikers Island food service overseer, each of these vignettes shares a common theme about devotion and dedication within the vast gastronomical spectrum. This is most eloquently dispatched by South Harlem baker “Mr. Lee,” who knows that “you got to be a 100 percent to do this.” Collectively, Yalof’s assortment of cuisines and memories paints a multiculturally diverse food tapestry, and each individually embodies a passion for food artistry that crosses generations, cultures, nationalities, and all manner of palates.
A wide-ranging, toothsome smorgasbord of Gotham's good eats and the tireless men and women behind each plate.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16892-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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