The vastly entertaining account of a Burgundian chef's rise to Guide Michelin three-stardom. Brilliant, volatile Bernard Loiseau came to the has- been restaurant La Cìte d'Or in 1975 and proceeded to make it a force in the world of haute cuisine. Loiseau combined the restaurant's traditional principles with the lighter and fresher nouvelle cuisine style to create a flavor all his own. He quickly gained his first and second stars and then stalled for nearly ten years as Guide Michelin assessed his staying power and stability. Fortune correspondent Echikson (Lighting the Night, 1990) joins the chef in 1990, as Loiseau pushes in earnest for the final star, to explore the lengths to which an ambitious chef would go to gain the coveted seal of approval. Very far, Echikson soon determines. Not only was Loiseau willing to incur the heavy financial burden of a $3 million renovation, but he even married to prove to Michelin inspectors that he was a serious and stable family man. But if the stakes are high, the rewards for success are great: A three-star rating from Michelin can mean the success or failure of a restaurant- -especially one in the remote Burgundy town of Saulieu and where the average dinner bill is $200 per person. Echikson follows the chef and his staff through the crucial year, as they stock their wine cellar, remake the premises, and perfect their cheese tray (which had been criticized by American food critic Patricia Wells). The workings of a great restaurant's kitchen are demystified, the Michelin mystique explored. In 1991 Michelin grants the third star to Loiseau and with it comes a 75% increase in business, more renovations, and dreams of even greater heights. A delectable tale artfully told.
Pub Date: June 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-19993-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
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