Becoming A Chef:; With Recipes and Reflections from America's Leading Chefs

Equal parts instruction and inspiration, this book chronicles culinary career options and opportunities and includes fascinating anecdotes from leading American chefs on their first jobs, mentors, successes, and setbacks.

This book should be mandatory reading for anyone considering a restaurant career. Dornenburg and Page show what working in a kitchen is really like-forget those ideas of glamour and celebrity. They begin with a brief history of restaurants and notable chefs, then move on to cooking schools and/or apprenticing, getting a job ("starting at the bottom"), and developing in the field. There's a chapter on opening a restaurant and one each on maintaining your edge and surviving the bad times. The authors interviewed 60 chefs from across the country, and relevant, pithy quotations are interspersed through the text, giving a good overview of the different experiences possible. Recipes from the chefs at first seem superfluous, but in fact they serve to convey the varied styles of many distinctive cooks. Fun to read, informative, and unique, this is an essential purchase for career collections.
Judith Sutton, "Sutton's Place Cuisine," New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Now that chefdom in the U.S. can mean glamour and riches, a career guide appears that doesn't necessarily deflate the profession but, rather, acts as a dose of reality to those starstruck by famous cooks. A practicing chef and a journalist, coupled both on these pages and in life, journey throughout the country to uncover the trials and temptations of the culinary world through interviews with 60 well-known chefs, from Alice Waters of Chez Panisse to Charlie Trotter of the eponymous Chicago restaurant. Why should a fledgling cook bother with culinary history? What are the different avenues of training? What should a chef's career path look like? What are some of the personal highs and lows of restaurant ownership? No easy answers are proffered, but clear insights into the profession, accompanied by about 60 traditional and new recipes, are guaranteed to steer wanna-be cooks either into or out of a professional kitchen. Barbara Jacobs