How I Learned to Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs
Forty chefs representing notable restaurants all over the world offer a bit of humorous history on how they cut their teeth in the kitchen. Many relate their apprentice moments quaking in the shadow of the Great Chef, such as 14-year-old Daniel Boulud's meeting the famous Paul Bocuse for the first time in his restaurant in Lyon and getting smashed on a glass of blanc cassis, or David Bayless's surreal collaboration with Julia Child on camera after admiring her since he was a kid watching her '60s TV show. Most savory are testimony from the trenches in the heat of the dinner rush, as in Jonathan Eismann's hilarious account of toiling in a fashionable New York City West Village restaurant during the high '80s when his drug-addled staff began dropping like dominos around him at the peak hours of service, and Gabrielle Hamilton's attempts in her tiny fledging restaurant, Prune, not to kill her sous chef with exploding wet fava beans frying in deep fat. Despite voices somewhat skewed in favor of male chefs, the stories are entertaining and well chosen by literary agent Witherspoon (Don't Try This at Home) andNew York Timescontributor Meehan.(Nov.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.