In The Kitchen
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2.6 • 5 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
At the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, chef Gabriel Lightfoot is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity and his sanity are under constant challenge from an exuberantly multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is planning a new venture. Despite the pressure, his hard work looks set to pay off.
Until the discovery of a porter's dead body in the kitchen appears to tip the scales. It is a small death, a lonely death - but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe's life.
In The Kitchen is Monica Ali's stunning follow up to Brick Lane. It is both the portrait of a man pushed to the edge, and a wry and telling look into the melting pot which is our contemporary existence. It confirms Monica Ali not only as a great modern storyteller but also an acute observer of the dramas of modern life.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
From the author: “There’s different backgrounds, ethnicities and languages found in the melting pot of the kitchen. And Gabe is very at home with this diversity. When he goes back to his hometown, his family seem to be less than happy with the changes they’re witnessing. Gabe is infuriated by what he sees as the racism, to put it bluntly. But this book interrogates those attitudes—is it really as simple as that?
“I grew up in a northern mill town: Bolton. And Gabe’s father still lives in a town not dissimilar. Gabe is in a London hotel, presiding over a kitchen that’s very multicultural and multinational and he has a breakdown. At one point, he finds himself working on a farm with Eastern European fruit and veg pickers—he’s sort of lost his mind at this point, and his identity, literally and figuratively. The book at its core is about identity. And at that moment he’s lost it. He then goes on to rebuild it. So I think that was a means of me tapping into who you are, how you construct yourself from the ground up. How much is it for you what society puts on you and how much of this is internal?
“I did lots of research in kitchens in London. And there’s a lot of alcoholism, there are lots of drugs, a lot of scars—literal scars, forms of self-harm and then accidents. It’s hot, fast-paced and tense, and it’s low paid with long hours. Which can be great and can also bring tension. In part, it’s like a ballet—a dance when the kitchen comes together—but it’s partly on a sort of semi-permanent war footing too.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
SignatureReviewed by Patricia VolkArestaurant kitchen is a functional substitute for hell. Flames leap, plates fly knives and fingers, too. They're also the default place immigrants, legal and otherwise, find work. At London's Imperial Hotel, the setting for Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, nobody speaks the same language and everybody is underpaid. Ali, acclaimed author of Brick Lane, nails the killer heat, killer fights and lethal grease buildup, all of it supervised by a "simmering culinary Heathcliff," Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef.Lightfoot dropped out of school at 16 to begin paying his kitchen dues, working crazy hours with crazy people while studying food chemistry and Brillat-Savarin. Along the way, he picked up scarred hands and a ravaged psyche. At 24, given his own restaurant, it went straight up his nose. Now, almost 20 years later, two wealthy Londoners have agreed to back Gabriel in a new restaurant, Lightfoot's, where he'll serve "Classic French, precisely executed. Rognons de veau dijonnaise, poussin en cocotte Bonne Femme, tripes la mode de Caen." In postmodern balsamic-drenched London, Gabriel is confident traditional French is poised for a comeback. Then the naked corpse of a Ukrainian night porter is discovered in the Imperial's basement, his head in a pool of blood. There is no one to claim the body. The ripple-free effect of a human death unhinges Gabriel. He develops a voluptuous need to self-sabotage. Visual manifestations include a Dr. Strangelove arm tic, shaking limbs and violent bald-spot scratching. Gabriel cheats on his fianc e and lies to his lover. The story is told in the third person, but through Gabriel's point of view. Intimacy juggles distance: "After a certain point, he could not stop himself. His desire was a foul creature that climbed on his back and wrapped its long arms around his neck."Ali is brilliant at showing loss and adaptation in a polyglot culture. Her descriptions of the changing peoplescape are fresh. But inside Gabriel's head is not the most compelling place to be. A tragic nonhero, he thinks with his "one-eyed implacable foe." It does not help that a recurring dream crumbles him, and since Gabriel doesn't understand the dream, neither does the reader. It assumes an unsustainable importance. You can play Freud or you can turn the page.Ali is not plot-averse: she provides a mysterious death, a hotel sex-trade scam, a slave-labor scheme, missing money and a dying parent. Yet Lightfoot is a character in search of a motive. It's a tribute to Ali that we care. Here is a true bastard, ravaged and out of control. In the Kitchen has the thud and knock of life inexplicable, impenetrable, not sewn up at all. As Gabriel's lover is fond of saying: "Tchh." Patricia Volk is the author, most recently, of the memoir Stuffed and the novel To My Dearest Friends(both from Knopf).
Customer Reviews
Didn't light my fire
I enjoyed the atmospheric depictions of London. However, I found the plot a tad tedious. I didn't really buy the whole psychological unraveling of Gabriel. Too many actions seemed at odds with his character. The twist/reveal at the end had never rolling my eyes.