Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line by Michael Gibney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My husband got us cable for Christmas last year, and one of the things we find ourselves doing is watching a rather obsessive amount of cooking shows. Shows about food, shows about the people who make food, shows about restaurants that should be making food but are apparently making a disgusting mess–I digress. Needless to say, when I saw SOUS CHEF up for grabs at Netgalley, I was excited to take a look at “24 Hours on the Line.”
SOUS CHEF is a peek into the fictionalized life of a sous chef, a step below the executive chef but still one of the enormous battery of cooks working the line (in the kitchen) of a rather large nameless restaurant in New York. It starts with an early rise and goes through the day towards a very late night and an equally early rise the next day. After reading this, I’m pretty sure I never want to be a chef, though the things the author details are fascinating. The author doesn’t prettify anything; his protagonist chef makes mistakes, and plenty of them, and suffers the consequences. Of course, there are also neat parts about the beauty of a clean kitchen and the rhythm of a working line, hustling to cover three hundred diners a night.
The author describes nearly everything, though the reader will be glad of the extensive glossary. Those who appreciate the science behind food will find something here, along with those who are super-picky about being in a clean environment. Cooking in a big restaurant is much different than cooking for two on a home’s stove. Good restaurants use good ingredients, and every time that maxim fails, the cooks lose time and possibly customers, so the book really drives home the fact that all cooks need to be perfect, all the time.
I didn’t have very many gripes with this one, other than the main character smokes (I’ve never understood the prevalence of smoking among food workers–it’s a horrible habit and dulls your sense of smell). And unless you are well-read about the goings-on in a kitchen, you’ll probably have to visit the glossary more than once. But if you want to know what it’s like to be on the line in a busy kitchen without getting your hands in the way of a knife, take a look at this book. I can only dream of having a kitchen so large!
Received as a free digital ARC via Netgalley and the publisher.