'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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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

Funny, outrageous, passionate, and unrelenting, Vogue's food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten, will stop at nothing, as he makes clear in these forty delectable pieces.Whether he is in search of a foolproof formula for sourdough bread (made from wild yeast, of course) or the most sublime French fries (the secret: cooking them in horse fat) or the perfect piecrust (Fannie Farmer--that is, Marion Cunningham--comes to the rescue), he will go to any length to find the answer.At the ...

**The New York Times Bestselling Book--Great gift for Foodies“The best, funniest, most revealing inside look at the restaurant biz since Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.” —Jay McInerney**With a foreword by Mario BataliJoe Bastianich is unquestionably one of the most successful restaurateurs in America—if not the world. So how did a nice Italian boy from Queens turn his passion for food and wine into an empire? In

**Author of Save Me the Plums Ruth Reichl’s iconic, bestselling memoir of her time as an undercover restaurant critic for The New York Times"Expansive and funny." —Entertainment Weekly**Ruth Reichl, world-renowned food critic and former editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, knows a thing or two about food. She also knows that as the most important food critic in the country, you need to be anonymous when reviewing some of the most high-pro...

**In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and Waiter Rant, a rollicking, eye-opening, fantastically indiscreet memoir of a life spent (and misspent) in the hotel industry.“Highly amusing."—New York Times**Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, ri...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERBefore Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Blood, Bones & Butter follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years: the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with an oily wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, ...