Don't Try This At Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs - Hardcover

Witherspoon, Kimberly; Friedman, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596910704 ISBN 13: 9781596910706

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2005

Synopsis

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs

A hilarious and heartening collection of kitchen disasters.

In this raucous new collection, over forty of the world's greatest chefs relate outrageous true tales from their kitchens. From hiring a blind line cook to flooding the room with meringue to being terrorized by a French owl, these behind-the-scenes accounts are as wildly entertaining as they are revealing. A delicious reminder that even the chefs we most admire aren't always perfect, Don't Try This at Home is a must-have for anyone who loves food or is fascinated by those who masterfully prepare it.

Ferrán Adrià on when lobsters go bad
José Andrés on asking for help
Dan Barber on talking to your fish
Mario Batali on the perfect risotto
Michelle Bernstein on the many uses of chocolate
Heston Blumenthal on the angriest maître d' in England
Daniel Boulud on one thousand bowls of soup
Anthony Bourdain on beating up the customers
Jimmy Bradley on drinking games
Scott Bryan on too many salamanders
David Burke on hiding the laundry
Samuel Clark on cooking for royalty
Tom Colicchio on sneaking through customs
Scott Conant on the persistence of eels
Tamasin Day-Lewis on how not to store a pheasant
Tom Douglas on the strange destiny of snowstorms
Wylie Dufresne on birds of prey
Jonathan Eismann on the healing powers of electricity
Claudia Fleming on runaway meringue
Gabrielle Hamilton on second sight
Fergus Henderson on the far from ordinary
Paul Kahan on caller ID
Hubert Keller on tempting fate
Giorgio Locatelli on the art of the French ambush
Michael Lomonaco on feeding Pavarotti
Pino Luongo on summer school in the Hamptons
Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger on getting away with it
Sara Moulton on how to destroy a food processor
Tamara Murphy on the misuses of foie gras
Cindy Pawlcyn on eating at home
Neil Perry on unexpected showers
Michel Richard on how to rescue a wayward cake
Eric Ripert on getting to the kitchen
Alain Sailhac on salty coffee and solitary confinement
Marcus Samuelsson on the languages of gelatin
Bill Telepan on the Fish Guys versus the Meat Guys
Laurent Tourondel on rib-eye rush hour
Tom Valenti on the grounds for revenge
Norman Van Aken on Key West hi-jinks
Geoffrey Zakarian on a license to eat dangerously

About this title

About the Author

Kimberly Witherspoon is a partner at Inkwell Management, a literary agency based in Manhattan. She is very proud to represent four of the chefs in this anthology: Anthony Bourdain, Tamasin Day-Lewis, Gabrielle Hamilton, and Fergus Henderson. She and her family live in North Salem, New York.

Andrew Friedman is a writer who specializes in all things culinary, with a focus on chef and restaurant culture. In addition to his own work, he has coauthored more than a dozen cookbooks with some of the most successful chefs and restaurateurs in the country, including Michael Lomonaco, Pino Luongo, Alfred Portale, Bill Telepan, and Tom Valenti. He lives in New York City with his family.

Reviews

Food is fast becoming entertainment, so it's only natural that it should follow in the footsteps of sports and show business and offer up a collection of bloopers. Literary agent Witherspoon and food writer Friedman corralled 40 gastronomic heavyweights to share their versions of dinners gone wrong. The highlight is, unsurprisingly, the piece by chef and bestselling author Anthony Bourdain. His "New Year's Meltdown" is a case study in what happens when you don't plan (Bourdain admits, "Nobody likes a 'learning experience'—translating as it does to 'a total [a**-f******]'—but I learned"). Mario Batali's "The Last Straw," though not relating a culinary catastrophe per se, is runnerup: Batali was in culinary school when he clashed with a chef; in a spectacular crescendo, the chef hurled a pan of risotto at the young student, but revenge was sweet. But for every fantastic screwup, there's a dud. The translated pieces (such as the one by Spanish titan Ferrán Adrià) fail to captivate, and others, like Jimmy Bradley's tale about how he got drunk on the job to spite his boss, are neither entertaining nor instructive. Still, this collection happily reminds us that even big shots have off days. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"In my long and checkered career I have been witness to, party to, and even singularly responsible for any number of screw-ups, missteps, and over-reaches. I am not Alain Ducasse. The focus of my career has not always been a relentless drive towards excellence. As a mostly journeyman chef, knocking around the restaurant business for twenty-eight years, I ve witnessed some pretty ugly episodes of culinary disaster. I have seen an accidentally glass-laden breaded veal cutlet cause a customer to rise up in the middle of a crowded dining room and begin keening and screaming with pain as blood dribbled from his mouth. I ve watched restaurants endure mid-dinner rush fires, floods rodent infiltration as well as the more innocuous annoyances of used band-aids, tufts of hair, and industrial staples showing up in the Nicoise salad. Busboy stabbing busboy, customer beating up customer, waters duking it out on the dining room floor I ve seen it all. But never have a I seen such a shameful synergy of Truly Awful Things happen, and in such spectacular fashion, as on New Years Eve 1991, a date that surely deserves to live in New York restaurant infamy "--Anthony Bourdain, "New Years Meltdown"

"After looking at the fries, the chef decided that I had cheated, making them the day before and stashing them in the walk-in. I assured him that I hadn t cheated. In fact, I invited him to walk across the kitchen where he could see the evidence of freshness for himself: the spent potato peels, still in the garbage can. But he didn t want to hear this. He so didn t want to hear it that he call me a name he had never called me before: navvy. To this day, I m not sure what it means. But when he called me that, a hush fell over the restaurant staff, as though Marco had just slapped me with his gloves and I was supposed to challenge him to a duel " --Mario Batali, "The Last Straw"

"My chef and I were charged with making one dish that night: Smoked salmon served with a thin sliver of avocado terrine. To make the terrine, you prepared a béchamel, then folded in an avocado puree. The mixture was poured into a mold and a gelatinous liquid was poured over it. It was then refrigerated so the gelatin would set up and suspend the beautiful puree. My chef took the salmon for himself and assigned me the terrine. Eagerly, I went to get some gelatin from the supply room, but discovered that all they had was the powdered variety. Having only used sheet gelatin, I turned the package over to read the instructions. On the back of the box there were what I m sure were very helpful tips, written in not one but three languages: German, French, and Italian. This was about the time when I realized that this wasn t going to be my day "--Marcus Samuelsson, The Big Chill"

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1596910704
• ISBN 13: 9781596910706
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Witherspoon Kimberly, Friedman Andrew