Synopses & Reviews
From one of our most interesting literary figures – former editor of Granta, former fiction editor at The New Yorker, acclaimed author of
Among the Thugs – a sharp, funny, exuberant, close-up account of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook.
Expanding on his James Beard Award-winning New Yorker article, Bill Buford gives us a richly evocative chronicle of his experience as “slave” to Mario Batali in the kitchen of Batali’s three-star New York restaurant, Babbo.
In a fast-paced, candid narrative, Buford describes three frenetic years of trials and errors, disappointments and triumphs, as he worked his way up the Babbo ladder from “kitchen bitch” to line cook . . . his relationship with the larger-than-life Batali, whose story he learns as their friendship grows through (and sometimes despite) kitchen encounters and after-work all-nighters . . . and his immersion in the arts of butchery in Northern Italy,
of preparing game in London, and making handmade pasta at an Italian hillside trattoria.
Heat is a marvelous hybrid: a memoir of Buford’s kitchen adventure, the story of Batali’s amazing rise to culinary (and extra-culinary) fame, a dazzling behind-the-scenes look at a famous restaurant, and an illuminating exploration of why food matters. It is a book to delight in, and to savour.
From the Hardcover edition.
Review:
A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2006A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2006
“Sharing Buford’s table talk is a pleasure not to be passed up.” — Michael Redhill, The Globe and Mail
“A messy, brilliant book, a high-brow kitchen soap opera, which never skates over the characters’ flaws but is suffused with an infectious love of food and the people who devote their lives to it.” —The Telegraph (UK)
“An incisive, cracklingly funny book.” — Time (Canada)
“Heat, tightly written, evocative and compelling, is a feast in its own right.” — Edmonton Journal
“A difficult book to put down — if Heat was a movie, you’d be viewing it from behind your fingers. The book is an intoxicating drug we can’t get enough of in paragraph after breathless paragraph of fast-paced and candid prose that leaves both the writer and the reader humbled.... And when one reluctantly turns the last page on Heat, it is with a sadness and a hungering for more.” — Toronto Sun
From the Hardcover edition.
Review:
“Buford develops a superbly detailed picture of life in a top restaurant kitchen. . .
Heat is a sumptuous meal.”
The New York Times
Synopsis:
A highly acclaimed writer and editor, Bill Buford left his job at
The New Yorker for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, the revolutionary Italian restaurant created and ruled by superstar chef Mario Batali.
Finally realizing a long-held desire to learn first-hand the experience of restaurant cooking, Buford soon finds himself drowning in improperly cubed carrots and scalding pasta water on his quest to learn the tricks of the trade. His love of Italian food then propels him on journeys further afield: to Italy, to discover the secrets of pasta-making and, finally, how to properly slaughter a pig. Throughout, Buford stunningly details the complex aspects of Italian cooking and its long history, creating an engrossing and visceral narrative stuffed with insight and humor.
Synopsis:
Expanding on his August 2002 "New Yorker" article, Buford now offers a richly evocative chronicle of his experience as "slave" to Mario Batali in the small, chaotic, highest-standards kitchen of Batalis three-star New York restaurant, Babbo, and of his apprenticeships with Batalis former teachers.
About the Author
Bill Buford is a Staff Writer and European Correspondent for
The New Yorker. He was the Fiction Editor of the magazine for eight years, from April 1995 to December 2002. Before that he edited
Granta magazine for sixteen years and, in 1989, became the publisher of Granta Books. He has edited three anthologies:
The Best of Granta Travel,
The Best of Granta Reportage, and
The Granta Book of the Family.
Bill is also the author of Among the Thugs (Norton, 1992), a highly personal nonfiction account of crowd violence and British soccer hooliganism. For The New Yorker, he has written about sweatshops, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and chef Mario Batali.
Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1954, Bill Buford grew up in California and was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Kings College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for his work on Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jessica Green, and their two sons.
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