Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)There is a fascinating story in this book, but unfortunately it never emerges. Marco White has all the elements - talent, glamour, flamboyance, brilliant chef and restauranteur, and a real flair for drama and theatrics. In telling his own story, however, he settles for a recitation of all the bad-boy behavior told with a tedious lack of insight and an unattractively smug tone. How long can you go on tossing people out of your restaurant (customers, employees and business partners alike) and your life (friends, colleagues, mentors and wives) before it occurs to you that the problem isn't other people, but you? For White, it seems that the answer is "Forever." White's personal story is compelling - up from a working class background, raised by an emotionally distant father after his mother's early death, inspired by food and cooking to reach the pinnacle of British cuisine (stop snickering - it does exist and he did it) at a very young age and thereby gaining entry into the glitzy jet set that he both loves and is uncomfortable with. The problem is that he lists the facts ("This is how I got this job; this is where I worked under brutal conditions that would fell a lesser man and where I loved it until I hated it and was fired or quit; this was a cooking genius I deeply admired and learned enormously from until I stopped admiring and now we don't speak; and I did this all because I am driven by an unslakeable thirst to brag about what a pain-junkie I am") without conveying any of the excitement and enthusiasm that must have fueled this. Other than being self-congratulatory ad nauseum about what a tough bastard he is, White has nothing to offer a reader trying to understand how he became the culinary rock-star that he is - a phrase he cannot get enough of.And that is a pity, because a book by a chef should at least be able to convey his knowledge of and passion for food. Three Michelin stars are not just handed out like Halloween candy, and a chef with his talent, knowledge and experience - aaah, it's just plain frustrating that the food part of this takes a distant second place to Big Bad Bullying Chef stories. Where is all the sublime food that he must have cooked? The hunt for superb ingrdients? The remarkable techniques that transformed a simple rice dish into "the best risotto he ever ate"? Missing, that's where. Foodies everywhere will be disappointed.Oh, yeah - if you are going to list sex first in your subtitle, there should be more of it in the book other than an acknowledgment that you are shy with the birds and that you preferred cooking to sex. Especially when you are also saying that you routinely shagged customers in your office during dinner service. One chapter of the book relates his law suit against the NY Times for publishing a mildly defamatory profile of him, where one of his successful claims was that the piece damaged his reputation among American diners who might now avoid his restaurants. Considering what he has done to himself with this book, White should return the money.
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The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef
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