Have you ever had a love/hate relationship with food? Ate only because you were tired, lonely, bored, anxious or frustrated? Celebrated a new love with a few of your favorite treats? Buried love spurned with yet more of those same treats? Refused an engagement because nothing you owned fit? Postponed clothes shopping because until you lost a pesky 10 pounds? Measured your love for someone or her love for you by your or her response to a favorite dish?
If so — and who among us can honestly answer no to every such question? — you should read, and will enjoy, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full Time Eater.
Frank Bruni ended his five year stint as restaurant critic for the New York Times with the publication of this memoir. He chronicles his love, hate, struggles and successes with food and eating from his earliest childhood and school years, through his early career in Detroit and his assignments with the Times in New York, the presidential campaign trail, Washington and Rome. He traces his relationships with family, friends and lovers through the meals (and more) shared with them. Finally, he applies what he has learned about himself to his duties as the most influential restaurant critic in America, if not the world.
His observations are personal and poignant, often amusing and sometimes downright scary, all handled with a deft touch I appreciated in his reviews.
Amazon link.
P.S. You can follow Bruni on Twitter @FrankBruni.
Each Monday when her restaurant is closed, Lillian conducts cooking classes in the restaurant kitchen. She doesn’t offer single classes; rather, a program block consists of weekly classes held over several months. Author Erica Bauermeister explores the lives of Lillian’s students attending one such program and the lessons they learn at Lillian’s hands.
You just may learn more about cooking from this slim novel than you have from the shelves of cookbooks that you own.
Amazon link here.
The cover story [edit: only certain covers; the mail subscriber version has an apple on the cover] in the October issue of Gourmet magazine features 126 American restaurants worth your money. The honorees range from ultra-expensive restaurants of international fame to places you have never heard of. The article is subdivided by region, the Midwest appearing last. Nine Midwest restaurants received recognition as being places worthy of your spending your own money to dine there, four in Chicago, two in Minneapolis, one in Wisconsin, one in South Dakota and one in Cincinnati.
Which Cincinnati restaurant, you ask? None other than my favorite daytime hangout — Tucker’s Restaurant located at 1637 Vine Street in the heart of Over the Rhine! [Article not yet online; link forthcoming when available.]
Other recipients included well known eateries Alinea (Chicago), Central Michel Richard and Komi (Washington, D.C), Bacchanalia (Atlanta), Grammercy Tavern (New York), and Cyrus (Sonoma County). Each of those restaurants receives international press almost weekly (and has a PR professional or five on retainer). Pretty heady company for our fairly unknown gem.
Congratulations to Joe and Carla Tucker! Please make it a point to stop by, enjoy a meal and congratulate the Tuckers in person.
Now the whole world knows what I have known for years; I wonder if I will still be able to get a seat at the counter?
Vine Street, Over the Rhine
If you have any interest whatsoever in cooking, its history and its social context, you will want to read the recently released Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. Wrangham is a professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University.
In Catching Fire, Wrangham presents and defends his thesis that the act of cooking drove the biological and sociological changes that made us human. Contrary to the popular view among anthropologists that humans have been cooking food for 250,000 to 400,000 years, Wrangham has our ancestors cooking much, much earlier. He makes a compelling case that cooking food is the only reasonable explanation for the physiological changes present in Homo Erectus when it emerged approximately 1.9 million (!) years ago. Wrangham also covers the sociological changes that cooking permitted, evidence of which changes are with us even today.
Catching Fire is a fascinating read; I couldn’t put it down. Too bad I didn’t get around to writing a bit about it until others started jumping on the bandwagon.
Link to page at Amazon.
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human