Stuffed : Growing Up in a Restaurant Family - Softcover

Patricia Volk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747561710 ISBN 13: 9780747561712

Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2003

Synopsis

'We were a restaurant family, four generations in a six-block radius. When you opened our fridge, food fell on your feet.' Three generations of Patricia Volk's family have been in the restaurant business. Her hallway was the colour of ball-park mustard, the living room was cocoa and the floor was like Genoa salami. At Morgen's, the famous restaurant in the garment district which her grandfather started and which her father ran, she was the princess. Waiters winked at her and twirled her napkin up high before draping it on her lap and when she wanted a hamburger, her grandfather would grind the steak himself. In "Stuffed", Patricia Volk marvellously evokes everyday life in a New York Jewish family and what it was like to grow up around an old fashioned family run restaurant. Wildly entertaining, this is a wonderful portrait of a fabulous family and a charming recreation of a lost era.

About this title

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:

: “Taut, sharp... Vibrantly textured. . . . Volk has a gift for seeing the world in a grain of salt.” —The New York Times Book Review

“This funny, hearbreaking 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.” –Philip Lopate

“My nominee for Book of the Year. . . It’s funny, it’s affecting, it’s wise, it’s New York, it’s close to the bone, it’s wonderfully well-written. Above all, it’s about how a real family functions." –Michael M. Thomas, The New York Observer

"The message of Volk's loopy, generous memoir, Stuffed, is that there is no such thing as too much food or too much feeling. . . . Stuffed is just what a good restaurant meal should be–soaked in atmosphere, full of strong flavors, handsome on the plate." —Los Angeles Times

“Unnervingly delightful. . . . In these gorgeous, generous pages . . . the sweetness never ends. ” –The Miami Herald

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0747561710
• ISBN 13: 9780747561712
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256