Cooking Dirty is a rollicking account of life “on the line” in

the restaurants, far from culinary school, cable TV, and the

Michelin Guidewhere most of us eat out most of the time. It

takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place.

From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen,

Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a

French colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off the

interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant

work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a way

of life in which “your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel

box filled with knives and meat and fire.” The kitchen crew is a

fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex

in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking

is a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly done

mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the

kitchen itself, as he tells it, is a place in which lifes mysteries

are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and frieda place where

people from the margins find their community and their calling.

With this deeply affecting book, Sheehan (already acclaimed

for his reviews) joins the first class of American food writers at

a time when books about food have never been better or more

popular.