Steal the Menu
A Memoir of Forty Years in Food
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Four decades of memories from a gastronome who witnessed the food revolution from the (well-provisioned) trenches—a delicious tour through contemporary food history.
When Raymond Sokolov became food editor of The New York Times in 1971, he began a long, memorable career as restaurant critic, food historian, and author. Here he traces the food scene he reported on in America and abroad, from his pathbreaking dispatches on nouvelle cuisine chefs like Paul Bocuse and Michel Guérard in France to the rise of contemporary American food stars like Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz, and the fruitful collision of science and cooking in the kitchens of El Bulli in Spain, the Fat Duck outside London, and Copenhagen’s gnarly Noma.
Sokolov invites readers to join him as a privileged observer of the most transformative period in the history of cuisine with this personal narrative of the sensual education of an accidental gourmet. We dine out with him at temples of haute cuisine like New York’s Lutèce but also at a pioneering outpost of Sichuan food in a gas station in New Jersey, at a raunchy Texas chili cookoff, and at a backwoods barbecue shack in Alabama, as well as at three-star restaurants from Paris to Las Vegas.
Steal the Menu is, above all, an entertaining and engaging account of a tumultuous period of globalizing food ideas and frontier-crossing ingredients that produced the unprecedentedly rich and diverse way of eating we enjoy today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sokolov invites readers to join him around the table and to share the many repasts he's consumed, skewered, and roasted over the past 40 years as a food critic in this delightful remembrance of meals past. In 1971, Sokolov joins the New York Times as its chief food critic, succeeding the popular Craig Claiborne. Although a bit cowed by this new assignment, he embraces it with gusto, recalling his the ways that his earlier experiences with food and eating have prepared him for this moment. In the summer of 1960, eating his way across Europe, Sokolov says he "acquires a huge new vocabulary of dishes andouillette, marcassin, cou d'oie farci aux lentilles I tasted every one of those dishes with gusto and could still give you a vivid account of the flavors and textures in many of them." Such experience gives him the confidence, the vocabulary, and the judgment that stays with him over the course of his career as a food critic. In his Times reviews, Sokolov famously knocks the until-then well-regarded French restaurant Le Grenouille off its pedestal, calling it on the cutting board for its "canned-tasting peas and clams in white wine too humdrum for a top restaurant." At the same time, he elevates the status of Lut ce, which "feels like a real French restaurant with topflight dishes you might find in France." Captivating and humorous, Sokolov's inviting memoir joins the ranks of Ruth Reichl's and Judith Jones's elegant recollections of a life lived at table.
