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
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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