Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential left me with the desire to read more about the crazy underworld of the professional, restaurant kitchen. It was only natural that I'd be attracted to a book recounting the experiences of a writer who decides to start learning to cook professionally in his early forties. It's a rocking cool book. Buford talks about apprenticing (and suffering) in Mario Batali's Babbo's kitchen, about the passion for food in Italy, about the strange and fascinating personalities in the restaurant business, and about his obsessive research about various aspects in food and cooking. Of the latter discussions, my favorite one was his quest to discover when people started to use egg in pasta dough (yes, "pasta dough" would be an obscene redundancy in the Italian language, but I'm writing in English, so "lasciami in pace." The book culminates in Bufords apprenticeship with a Tuscan butcher and that segment is at the same time informative, amusing, and disturbing.
If you're a confessed foodie, you will want to read this book.
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