Engrossing details of being the front man in a variety of thriving restaurants.
A frank and funny memoir of a successful New York restaurateur.
Distinctly Italian with a twist of Queens, Bastianich displays a palpable love of good Italian food and wine throughout his humorous reflections on how he became one of the best-known restaurant owners in New York City. From his early days as a dishwasher and busboy in his parents’ Italian restaurant (his mother is famed chef Lidia Bastianich), the author learned the basics of restaurant management—e.g., “your margins are three times your cost on everything”; “you have to appear to be generous, but you have to be inherently a cheap fuck to make it work”; “no bottle of wine costs more than five dollars to make.” After a stint in Wall Street and a wild time in Italy working in restaurants and vineyards, Bastianich returned to New York, unable to deny his “biological imperative.” Using the maxims his father had taught him, he launched his own restaurant, Becco, and from there the direction was only up. He and his business partner, Mario Batali, moved on to open many other prosperous Italian eateries, culminating in his part ownership of Del Posto, the only four-star Italian restaurant in America. Despite his liberal use of the f-bomb, the author’s easygoing voice and substantial knowledge of real Italian food (not the spaghetti-and-meatballs kind) will lure booklovers and food lovers alike. Oenophiles will appreciate Bastianich’s rich descriptions of the many Italian wines he recommends and his savant-like ability to recall and identify the tens of thousands of wines he has tasted since his childhood.
Engrossing details of being the front man in a variety of thriving restaurants.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02352-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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