Don't Try This At Home: Culinary Catastrophes From The World's Greatest Chefs (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Cast in its most positive light, with the exception of language that is, in my opinion, inappropriate to the situation or the reading audience, this collection of chefs' "outrageous true tales" depicts the restaurant industry as the "downstairs" of the Public Television series Upstairs Downstairs. What societal pressures created these often mean spirited chefs and cooks who cannot ask for help, identify that they even need help, or acknowledge (at the time, to the customer) the food "catastrophe" and how they created it by their own driving, planning, timing, preparation, inflated ego, lack of knowledge, etc. and how they plan to make it right? When did honesty become the last policy? One chef goes so far as cast blame on "the dogs": Michel Richard's Alibi.With these glimpses of what goes on behind the scenes, can I comfortably eat out again?????Page 194But we had big problems finding support in the kitchen or the dining room. It quickly became apparent to me that no matter how many ads we ran in the paper, and no matter how many phone calls I made, we were going to have trouble filling all the positions. As for the few employees that we did manage to find -- locals who had worked in diners and greasy-spoon joints -- they could barely handle the pressure. Most of them stopped showing up for work after a few day, never to be heard from again.I hope that the chef of preceding paragraph, Pino Luongo, learned to do market research before buying and developing subsequent properties. He kept "shooting the messengers" (the work force available to him in the remote area where HE CHOSE to locate). As for the pressure he mentions, it was his creation. What could he do to reduce the pressure on new employees so they wanted to return to work?
My boyfriend got me this book for Christmas two years ago because I love both books and cooking, and I just now have finally finished it! It was a great gift idea, but unfortunately it didn't quite live up to my expectations. Don't Try This at Home is okay, but nothing too special. It's basically a compilation of (mostly unheard-of) successful chefs who, at one point in their careers, did or experienced something crazy and awful that was food-related. A couple of the stories were actually very funny and "OMG!"-worthy, but many of them verged on boring. It was also kind of a long book for a compilation of this type. I mean, how many "cooking gone wrong" stories do I really need to read? Some of them were only a few pages, so there ended up being like 40 stories! Eventually, I was just no longer interested.This was a cute idea for a book, but ultimately it isn't star-studded enough or edited-down enough for me to be able to recommend it to anyone.
What do You think about Don't Try This At Home: Culinary Catastrophes From The World's Greatest Chefs (2005)?
This is the perfect carry-along book for the bus, doctor or dentist office. Chapters are approx. 4-10 pages long, quick reads. Each chapter is the remembrance of a chef, 40 in all. Some I recognize (Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain), most I didn't. Some are funny, some would make a perfect disaster movie. (Hundreds of live eels accidently dumped on the kitchen floor; an outdoor wedding reception ruined by a sudden rain storm - but the $30,000 wedding cake survived intact because it was shielded by people with umbrellas, the bride was not.). I enjoy reading mysteries and picked this up as a change of pace. I had no idea the real mysteries in professional kitchens. This is a fun and surprising read.
—Quanita
a fun easy read. at times some of the chefs come off as pretentious but at least they kept the chapters mercifully short. with the exception of Tamasin Day Lewis who had the longest entry in the collection. I made it 3 pages in to her bizarre and painfully boring story (all backstory that had nothing to do with her actual story) before I eventually skipped it entirely. Highlights include Michelle Bernstein ,Anthony Bourdain ,David Burke , Samuel Clark ,Jonathan Eismann , and Claudia Fleming. These chapters had all the fun culinary hi jinks the book promises with out all the insufferable pretension to strip them of their charm. A good waiting room read.
—Maria
Perhaps there's a reason these folks are chefs and not writers. I read a few of these essays, and I *love* reading cooking- and food-related nonfiction...but after a few I was ready to put this one back on the shelf. Even with what must have been extensive editing, these stories failed to capture me. Chefs with egos too high to admit that they ever do anything wrong (it's always the other crazy people in the kitchen) are just annoying; those that actually admitted *they* may have screwed things up just weren't interesting...Maybe the gems are at the end. But that's not a good way to sequence a book of short pieces, if so. B/c I'm not willing to plow farther to find them.Anyway, according to my own tradition, I will not rate this book b/c I didn't read all of it. The unofficial rating based on a statistical sample is one star.
—Meredith
