Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Cooking Dirty

Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen by Jason Sheehan


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Sheehan is a good writer. I've enjoyed his work as a restaurant critic for Denver's Westword for awhile and he's managed to take that edgy style of his and expand it into a full book.

This book chronicles his life working in kitchens--not famous ones, just regular ol' restaurants. At times, it got a bit redundant. I wanted to say, okay, we get it: cooking on a line during the rush is like going into battle and the guys who do it are tough. The book could have standed a bit of editing--too many similar stories about getting slammed during a dinner (or late night) rush. The book finishes with a little bit about how he got into food writing.

But all in all, I really enjoyed this book. The book will inevitably be compared to Bourdain's, but while that book is touted as an expose of the restaurant industry, this one is more of a memoir of how Sheehan has used and abused himself and turned out okay in the end.

And I'm wondering if the restaurant in the epilogue is Osteria Marco?

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