HEAT by Bill Buford

Allow me to assume that you have at least a passing interest in reading about restaurants and food.

As for me, I passed the passing interest stage a long time ago. For reasons I cannot fully explain, I still read online reviews of restaurants in cities I haven’t lived in for years.

Until very recently, however, I had never read a book about restaurants. A few weeks ago, a friend recommended one to me. Now, I’m recommending it to you.

I am just finishing HEAT by Bill Buford, a staff writer and former fiction editor at the New Yorker. The book's full title is actually HEAT: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.

That almost says it all. But I’ll tell you a little more. The first part of the book profiles star chef Mario Batali and his three-star (The New York Times) Italian restaurant, Babbo.

Batali puts Buford to work in the kitchen and he doesn’t get the star journalist treatment. He is properly abused and gets an unfiltered look at the personalities and politics behind big league cooking. This is a rarely-observed world and Buford learns secrets that are seldom shared.

He tells you what goes on backstage at the show. He tells you what goes into the sausage.

This is not a cook book. This is a first-person tale of obsession, survival, and transformation. It's good fun to read.

The stories about Buford’s first trips to Italy to learn about pasta also have plenty of color and fun characters. The last chapters on learning from the master butcher does get weighed down with a few too many descriptive passages. The highlight here was his amazement at the maestro’s ability to taste a piece of meat and then describe the cow it came from, including its diet and country of origin.

I will tell you my favorite line in the book. Buford quotes Batali on an essential factor for success in the restaurant business:

“If someone has a great dish and returns to have it again, and you don’t serve it to him in exactly the same way, then you’re a dick.”

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford