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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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