Food and Restaurant Memoirs

New York chef Tony Bourdain gives away secrets of the trade in his wickedly funny, inspiring memoir and expos. From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable. "Kitchen Confidential" reveals what Bourdain calls "25 years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine".

Expanding on his August 2002 "New Yorker" article, Bill Buford now offers a richly evocative chronicle of his experience as "slave" to Mario Batali in the small, chaotic, highest-standards kitchen of Batali's three-star New York restaurant, Babbo, and of his apprenticeships with Batali's former teachers.

Wife of the Chef is at once a no-holds-barred memoir of restaurant life and a revealing look at married life. For Courtney Febbroriello, the two are intertwined. She and her husband own an American bistro in Connecticut. He's the chef, so naturally he gets all the credit. She has the role of keeping things running, but she's the wife, so she remains anonymous or invisible or both.
Febbroriello comes front and center here, detailing the everyday challenges she faces--taking over dish-washing duty, bailing waiters out of jail, untangling the immigration laws, cajoling lazy suppliers, handling unreasonable customers, and a host of other emergency duties. She pokes fun at people who take food and wine--and the chef--too seriously, with witty comments on everything from "chef envy" to the much-ballyhooed James Beard Awards.
Spiced with

Jeannette Ferrary, a food writer for the "New York Times and author of "M. F. K Fisher and Me, recounts her life as it relates to food. Contains portraits of America's food-world celebrities--Julia Child, Alice Waters, Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey, and Ruth Reichl, to name a few.

Fisher identifies a variety of human cravings and the means to find nourishment in what is the most intimate of the five volumes in North Point's jacketed paperback series, now complete.

The famous chef describes his early life in France, culinary training, arrival in the U.S., enlistment in the U.S. Army during World War II, combat experiences in his native France, and postwar career as a chef and food arbiter in America. 20,000 first printing.

Food lovers who want to express themselves through article writing, restaurant reviewing, and cookbook writing will find the tools to get started in the incredibly popular world of food writing.

"Homesick" is a women's riveting and emotionally complex story of pain and tentative, hard-won recovery that bravely confronts the roots and nuances of eating disorders and the myriad ways they are enabled and rationalized by sufferers, their loved ones, and even the medical community itself.

More than just great food writing, this long-overdue rebuttal to the notion that all women are on a diet celebrates food with grace, wit, and gusto.

In this viscerally powerful memoir, Nguyen pens a nostalgic, candid account of growing up as a Vietnamese girl in the Midwest in the 1980s, and using popular American food--from Pringles potato chips to Toll House cookies--as a way to fit in and become a real American.

This delicious new volume of Reichl's acclaimed memoirs recounts her "adventures in deception," as she goes undercover in the world's finest restaurants. The editor-in-chief of "Gourmet," she is the author of the bestsellers "Tender at the Bone" and "Comfort Me with Apples."

The acclaimed author of "The Soul of a Chef" explores the allure of the celebrity chef in modern America.

Beloved British food writer Nigel Slater presents a yearlong record of his grocery shopping, cooking, and entertaining, along with endearing culinary stories and witticisms plus dozens of recipes and more than 300 full-color photographs.

From actor Michael Tucker comes this celebration of a good marriage and a careful study of the nature of home, written with an epicureans delight in detail and a gourmands appreciation for all things fine.

Patricia Volk's delicious memoir lets us into her big, crazy, loving, cheerful, infuriating and wonderful family, where you're never just hungry-your starving to death, and you're never just full-you're stuffed. Volk's family fed New York City for one hundred years, from 1888 when her great-grandfather introduced pastrami to America until 1988, when her father closed his garment center restaurant. All along, food was pretty much at the center of their lives. But as seductively as Volk evokes the food, Stuffed" is at heart a paean to her quirky, vibrant relatives: her grandmother with the "best legs in Atlantic City"; her grandfather, who invented the wrecking ball; her larger-than-life father, who sculpted snow thrones when other dads were struggling with snowmen. Writing with great freshness and humor, Patricia Volk will leave you hunger