Sous Chef
24 Hours in the Kitchen
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
'A terrific nuts and bolts account of the real business of cooking as told from the trenches. No nonsense. This is what it takes' ANTHONY BOURDAIN
'One of the most informative, funny and transparent books about the restaurant biz ever written' BRET EASTON ELLIS
Sous Chef takes you behind the swinging doors of a busy restaurant kitchen, putting you in chef's shoes for an intense, high-octane twenty-four hours. Follow him from the moment he opens the kitchen in the morning, as he guides you through the meticulous preparation, the camaraderie in the hours leading up to service and the adrenalin-rush as the orders start coming in. Thrilling, addictive and bursting with mouth-watering detail, Sous Chef will leave you breathless and awestruck - walking into a restaurant will never be the same again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Forgoing the usual route of outrageous stories, name dropping, or straight ahead cookbooks, Gibney writes about what it's actually like to work in the kitchen of a fine dining restaurant. Told in the second-person, from the point of a sous chef a kitchen's second-in-command and a position Gibney first reached at the age of 22 the narrative wonderfully captures a single day's events, from morning deliveries and prep work through a busy service to the team's cathartic release at a local bar. An experienced chef with an M.F.A. in nonfiction, Gibney is as skilled with words as he is with his 11-inch Sujihiki knife. In fact, when writing about this trusty knife his prose sounds more like poetry: "her outward lip traces lines in flesh with surgical exactitude, the convex shape of her inward face attenuates surface tension, releasing the meat. Cuts go slack at her touch; fish bows beside her." This love of language permeates the whole book so that Gibney is able to tie together the off-color Spanglish dialogues of the staff with his drunken philosophizing on whether or not cooking is "just another form enlightened self interest" to create a story that is both cohesive and multifaceted.