Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family - Hardcover

9780375411069: Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family
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In a restaurant family, you’re never just hungry—you’re starving to death. And you’re never full—you’re stuffed.
Patricia Volk’s family is as American (background: Austrian-Jewish) as “Rhapsody in Blue.” They came to these shores determined to make their mark; each of them is a piquant morsel of history. Great-grandfather Sussman Volk brought pastrami to the New World. Grandfather Jacob was known as “the Most Destructive Force on Wall Street” and was memorialized by E. B. White as “the greatest wrecker of all time” for his innovative method of demolition. Uncle Albert was the first man to stir scallions into cream cheese. The last of Grandfather Herman Morgen’s fourteen restaurants was a famous garment center hangout. One grandmother won the 1916 trophy for “Best Legs in Atlantic City.” The other was a three-hundred-pound calendar girl. Ms. Volk’s handsome, demanding restaurateur father invented the Six-color Retractable Pen and Pencil Set and the Double-sided Cigarette Lighter (so you never have to worry which end is up). For three generations, just about every Volk and Morgen (with the exception of Uncle Al, who had an eleven-year affair with Aunt Lil and then refused to marry her because she wasn’t a virgin) has, no matter what the circumstances, exhibited a terrifyingly positive attitude. With a cosmic disdain for the status quo, all of them—the tyrants, do-gooders, lovers, martyrs, and fakes—lived at full tilt.

Stuffed is a wildly funny yet unsparing look at how families work.

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Review:
Patricia Volk's enchanting memoir nails both 20th-century American life and the glorious eccentricities of her relatives with the gift for vivid detail of a fiction writer. (After all, she's published one novel and two short-story collections.) "Our hallway was the color of ballpark mustard. The living room was cocoa, my mother's wall-to-wall, iceberg green," she tells us. Volk begins with her adored immediate family: charismatic father, hypercritical but loving mother ("Mom made me, and now she will make me better"), and older sister Jo Ann, best friend and occasional mortal enemy. But they're only the beginning, just as the garment-district restaurant that rules her father's life is only one of the family achievements. Great-grandfather Sussman brought pastrami to the New World. Grandfather Jake, a demolition expert, was profiled in The New Yorker. "Everybody did one thing better than anybody else. Aunt Gertie sang the works of Victor Herbert. Aunt Ruthie mamboed. Granny Ethel braked with such finesse it was impossible to tell the moment the car went from moving to a stop." Of course, perennially negative Aunt Lil embroidered a pillow with the motto "I've Never Forgotten a Rotten Thing Anyone Has Done to Me"--but maybe she was embittered by the fact that Uncle Al slept with her for 11 years then refused to marry her because she wasn't a virgin. (She sent out wedding invitations anyway, and he fell in line.) All these great stories are arranged along a casual chronological arc ("from Sussman Volk in 1888 to Cecil Volk in 1988"), but nothing is ever really finished. Her father closes Morgen's in Manhattan; her sister's husband opens a trendy food shop in Florida. "We're still feeding people," Volk asserts. Readers will find her prose as delicious as family housekeeper Mattie's chocolate cake. Recipes included. --Wendy Smith
From the Back Cover:
"Novelist/essayist Volk pens a stylishly written memoir that's really a series of portraits of the memorable characters who make up her extended family . . . one beguiling vignette after another, and a good number of welcome reprises. Volk's classy prose, as smooth on its wheels as a Bentley, makes it work like a wonder. . . . Emotionally luxurious and heart-gladdening." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Toward the end of STUFFED, my reading slowed to a crawl. I hated to let go of a single vivid, funny, occasionally misguided but always big-hearted member of this great New York family. Like the best novelists, Patricia Volk gives us an entire world." –Frances Kiernan, author of Seeing Mary Plain : A Life of Mary McCarthy

"This remarkable memoir is more than just the food flavors of Patricia Volk's childhood growing up in a restaurant family in New York. It is chock full of the flavors of growing up in Middle Class America–I laughed, I cried, it is a treat!"
–Joan Nathan, author of The Foods of Israel Today

"This funny, heartbreaking book is good enough to eat. A whole lost world is conjured up here, with a vitality and love of daily life that has no time for sentimentality."
–Phillip Lopate

"What Marcel Proust did for the madeleine, Patricia Volk has achieved for Mattie's chocolate cake. This inspired journey through family history, like Proust's masterpiece, treats the reader to the re-creation of an era, with brilliantly observed details of dress, menu, manners, commerce and psychological mishigas. Cheers for Stuffed, a four star memoir."
–Sidney Offit, author of Memoir of the Bookie's Son

"A moving feast...Volk's life is an entertaining dinner party with hilarious guests around the table, and for the main course: the most beautiful and passionate account of a woman's love for her father that I have ever read."
–Jennifer Belle, author of High Maintenance

"Had I only known what was for dinner at Patty Volk's house, back when we were classmates at P.S. 9, I surely would have followed her home from school. STUFFED is a hilarious but fearless look at a fascinating family–a funny book that will break your heart."
–Eli Zabar

"Patricia Volk's family of restaurateurs are what they serve — too much and delicious. Stuffed with life themselves, they bustle around their own story as if they're perpetually late with the soup. We, in turn, could devour them forever. This book will become your favorite place to eat."
–Roger Rosenblatt


"Stuffed is a marvelously evocative portrait of a nearly lost New York sensibility. Reading it made me miss my grandmother and the lunch counters of my childhood. Patricia Volk's sharp, personal memoir is a celebration of family characters who could inhabit the fictions of Philip Roth or Saul Bellow. And like the very best sort of novel, Stuffed is both hilarious and deeply moving."
–Katharine Weber, author of Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear and The Music Lesson

"Every once in a while I like something better than anything. This once, this while, it is this book. No, not book, not book, but heart. Right this minute this is what I like better than anything–Volk's Nobel-prize-winning heart."
–Gordon Lish

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherKnopf
  • Publication date2001
  • ISBN 10 0375411062
  • ISBN 13 9780375411069
  • BindingHardcover
  • Number of pages224
  • Rating

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