Many love to eat, not all love to cook. Behind the doors of your favorite fine dining restaurant are likely a staff of people sweating, swearing, and frantically dicing onions. Being a chef is not yelling at your colleagues and only finding a moment of peace during a smoke break, but the restaurant industry is a notoriously difficult world that only those who really love food and cooking find themselves in. Rather than go the route of the Eat, Pray, Love style heady culinary memoir, consider reading these books about the lives of the restaurant industry people that make the dishes you love.
5 Books About the Highs and Lows of the Restaurant Industry
Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen by Charlotte Druckman
Want something beyond the Gordan Ramsay, Guy Fieri, or Anthony Bourdain perspective on life on the line? Charlotte Druckman’s Skirt Steak draws from over 70 female chefs’ interviews on why they cook, how they run a kitchen, and the pressures they’ve faced as women in a boys’ club. It cements the idea that there isn’t just one kind of chef, and that the image of the screaming men in The Bear doesn’t have to be the norm. (But that sometimes, women chefs can be just as cutthroat as men).
Heat by Bill Buford
New York Times writer Bill Buford became enamored with Chef Mario Batali’s cooking and in 2004, decided he wanted to learn it for himself. The descriptions of Batali’s kitchen are equal parts unnerving and mouthwatering, and Heat demonstrates just how much labor goes into the best restaurants in the world. Buford’s transformation from novice to prep cook to line cook to trusted team member is certainly not a bloodless one, but it’s an enjoyable read.
Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan
Last Night at the Lobster may be fictional, but the frying, yelling, and frenetic pouring of “Lobsteritas” will be all to real to anyone who’s worked in the less glamorous side of the restaurant world. Taking place on the final day of a soon-to-be-shuttered Reb Lobster in a harsh, cold New England winter, Last Night at the Lobster illuminates how managers, hostesses, and chefs work together and relate to each other to create an experiences, even at a chain restaurant.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
You knew this was coming. No list of books about restaurants is complete without Bourdain. But Kitchen Confidential is a classic for a reason. Bourdain did it like nobody else. His accounts of cooking go beyond the food itself and into the why of cooking, that intangible element of food that makes it truly special, and that all chefs search for and only some achieve.
Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line by Michael Gibney
Sous Chef doesn’t take place in one specific kitchen, but it could be every kitchen. With its second-person narration and hour by hour pacing, the reader really gets the sense of how stressful, but also how rewarding, it is to be a sous chef. Gibney highlights the sous specifically, taking you out of the focus of the executive chef and into what some chefs call “the hardest job in the kitchen” as the right-hand to the big boss.
Story by Emma Riva
Photo by Duane Mendes
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