'The Apprentice Chef' gives a glimpse into life as an apprentice working in a famous London Michelin star restaurant……"…The thing about working in a kitchen is that you have to be an adrenalin junkie and a sucker for punishment. There is just no other reason for working in one. If you want to be a chef because you like to cook, then do so at home because working in a professional kitchen you will soon grow out of it. Working in a professional kitchen is comparable to working on the...

**JAMES BEARD AWARD NOMINEE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“One of the great culinary stories of our time.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times**It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother’s house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he wil...

For two hundred years, a rogues' gallery of chefs, line cooks, and dishwashers have slaved away, largely unseen, to serve the dining public. Their pedigrees reach back to the first restaurants during the reign of France's Louis XVI and extend to the Delmonico brothers in New York, Escoffier in Paris, and, in Fried: Surviving Two Centuries in Restaurants, a renegade cook in Minneapolis walking like a duck with a whole, raw salmon on his head.Author and professional chef Steve Lerach...

Restaurant critics are supposed to maintain their distance about chefs and restaurateurs. Or so Todd Kliman had always maintained. But when Peter Chang, an emigre genius capable of turning ordinary food into small miracles, crossed his radar, he couldnt help himself. He becomes obsessed with Chang's cooking. When it turns out that the chef possesses both a checkered past and an increasingly enigmatic present, jumping from restaurant to restaurant across the country, fleeing towns and expec...

Accidental Chef is a sobering account of what it's really like to be a professional chef, not the glamorized, sugar-coated depictions we see on cable television. This book offers a glimpse of what it really like to work in a hotel patry shop and a busy restaurant. When you read Accidental Chef you can't help feeling that you right there with Charles in the kitchen. Through his vivid descriptions you'll be able to imagine the sights, sounds and smells of a real kitchen. Accidental Chef puts...

The author of The Soul of a Chef looks at the new role of the chef in contemporary cultureFor his previous explorations into the restaurant kitchen and the men and women who call it home, Michael Ruhlman has been described by Anthony Bourdain as "the greatest living writer on the subject of chefs, and on the business of preparing food." In The Reach of a Chef, Ruhlman examines the profound shift in American culture that has raised restaurant cooki...

Kitchen Confidential meets Heat in the first behind-the-scenes portrait of the world’s most influential restaurant and the aspiring culinary geniuses who toiled to make it so exceptional.WHAT GOES ON BEHIND THE SCENES AT ELBULLI?Elected best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine an unprecedented five times, elBulli is where chef Ferran Adrià’s remarkable cuisine comes to life—with dragon cocktails that ma...

Millions of people fantasize about leaving their old lives behind, enrolling in cooking school, and training to become a chef. But for those who make the decision, the difference between the dream and reality can be gigantic—especially at the top cooking school in the country. For the first time in the Culinary Institute of America’s history, a book will give readers the firsthand experience of being a full-time student facing all of the challenges of the legendary course in its entirety.

In this outrageous and delectable new volume, the Man Who Ate Everything proves that he will do anything to eat everything. That includes going fishing for his own supply of bluefin tuna belly; nearly incinerating his oven in pursuit of the perfect pizza crust, and spending four days boning and stuffing three different fowl—into each other-- to produce the Cajun specialty called “turducken.”It Must’ve Been Something I Ate finds Steingarten testing the virt...

Before he was a top chef, Tom Colicchio learned to love cooking when he was still slinging burgers at a poolside snack bar. Barbara Lynch tells the story of lying her way into her first chef's job and then needing to cook her way out of trouble in the galley kitchen of a ship at sea. Stories of mentorship abound: Rick Bayless tells the story of finally working with Julia Child, his childhood hero; Gary Danko of earning the trust of the legendary Madeleine Kamman. How I Learned to Cook

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIMEThe back must slave to feed the belly. . . . In this urgent and unique book, chef Michael Gibney uses twenty-four hours to animate the intricate camaraderie and culinary choreography in an upscale New York restaurant kitchen. Here readers will find all the details, in rapid-fire succession, of what it takes to deliver an exceptional plate of food—the journey to excellence by way of exha...

New York City's top concierge gives up a keyhole view into the luxe hotel rooms, private dining and dressing rooms of the ridiculous, rich and demandingMichael Fazio is the ultimate behind-the-scenes support man. Want two orchestra tickets to the Broadway musical that just won the Tony? Call Fazio. How about an upgrade to first class on an overbooked overnight flight to Tokyo? Call Fazio. Or a roomful of fresh hydrangeas—in winter? That's right. Call Fazio....