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Heat: I Bet Even Al Pacino Couldn't Take It

I used to be a restaurant manager: the guy in a suit and tie who makes sure the guests have the highest quality food and dining experience, the dining room staff is hired, scheduled, and fired (not all, just the deserving), the inventory doesn’t walk out the back door, and the booze is ordered…Occasionally I would also grab a live lobster from the tank and chase around the guys who wash the dishes: dish guys are always afraid of live lobsters.

One great thing about being a restaurant manager is that at the end of the night you could have a beverage and know whether or not you and your team were successful: were your customers and staff happy, did you do a large volume of business, were there no knife fights between the dish guys and the bussers.

One bad thing about being a restaurant manager is that I’d look across that display kitchen and see the chef there, standing proud in his whites, GoodYear-treaded boots, sparkling knife, and I’d instantly feel…well shall we say…less than macho.

Being a chef is a grueling job: heat, sociopathic cooks, long hours, and the smell of onions and smoke permanently embedded in your pores. But it also has that manly artist thing that makes it so appealing.

Knowing my feelings on this subject, my friend and workmate Cindy recommended to me the memoir Heat, by Bill Buford. In this book, the author tells us of how he always wanted the experience of working in a professional kitchen. The book starts with Buford inviting celebrity chef Mario Batali (they have a mutual friend) to a dinner party at Buford’s home. Batali took the party over, Buford asked him for a job, and achieves his goal of becoming Batali’s “kitchen slave.” Buford takes us through the people, eccentricities, dedication, fun, and drama of working as a professional cook. He also takes several trips to Italy to learn his craft whose lives bring generations of experience in making pasta, butchering, etc. These trips are quite strange and amusing. On his first visit to the master butcher in a small Italian town, everyone in the shop is drinking red wine and eating spoonfuls of frothy lard. Yummy!

Heat is a thoroughly enjoyable book and I think anyone with a culinary interest will especially enjoy it.