A thoughtfully observed study of what it takes to open a successful restaurant in the most competitive marketplace in the...
Journalist and narrative nonfiction author Stabiner (Getting In, 2010, etc.) closely tracks a talented, ambitious chef as he opens his first restaurant in New York.
When Jonah Miller made the decision to quit his job and open his first restaurant, he had already worked at a number of prestigious restaurants in the city. He began at 14 as an intern at Chanterelle and later worked in the kitchen at the famed Gramercy Tavern and as a sous chef at Maialino, along the way earning an enviable reputation within the highly competitive NYC food scene and being named to the 30-under-30 lists at both Forbes and Zagat. As expected, opening a restaurant in New York proved extremely difficult, with the risk of failure at every turn. Stabiner follows Jonah at each step in his decision-making, from the 18-month planning stage through his first year of business, building small narrative dramas as each event unfolds. With meticulous detail, perhaps too much for some readers, she chronicles his challenges finding investors, choosing a location, building out the space, and hiring, maintaining, and occasionally losing staff. Would the restaurant receive a coveted review from the New York Times? Would Jonah eventually be granted a full liquor license? After settling on a location in the East Village, Josh opened Huertas, a restaurant serving Basque-influenced cuisine, in 2014. “Jonah had a hunch that the city needed the kind of Spanish food he wanted to make, an accessible cuisine that still had novelty going for it,” writes the author. “He had to make Huertas work; at twenty-five, Jonah had narrowed his options to one. Being a chef, running his own restaurant and from there, a group of them, was all he wanted to do, and what he was trained to do.”
A thoughtfully observed study of what it takes to open a successful restaurant in the most competitive marketplace in the world.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58333-580-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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