Cookbooks - Long Night’s Journey Into Gastronomy

Food writing can be approached from a gazillion angles. Writers dream up all sorts of juicy angles on eating - memoirs, single-subject meditations, histories, guidebooks - and find both willing publishers and a hungry audience for their takes on gastronomy.

Andrew Todhunter, a freelance writer whose previous topic of focus was extreme sports, crafted a delectable idea: Recount a nearly four-hour meal he and his wife experienced at Taillevent, perhaps the most critically acclaimed restaurant in France, while weaving in stories from his three-month stint as an unpaid “reporter-apprentice” in Taillevent’s kitchen.

The resulting book, A Meal Observed (Knopf, $13 paperback), has an appealing premise that partially succeeds. Todhunter’s prose on the extravagant meal is liberally peppered with meandering musings, like food memories tied to his American childhood, the biographies of Taillevent’s key players, the changing nature of cuisine in France - even a short history of cheese. Todhunter is an evocative writer with a mind and palate for detail. Much of the ebb and flow between what’s on his plate at the restaurant and, say, a quick discourse on the nature of salt, meld naturally.

But his storytelling stumbles in the translation of the fine-dining experience. Todhunter goes a bit too far in his attempt to convey his everyman journey into culinary nirvana. He equates walking into the restaurant with performance anxiety, and his interactions with his wife during the meal are awkward. The couple seems so tense, I wonder if they enjoyed the amazing food at all. It isn’t until dessert, near the book’s end, when they bite into Fantasie aux Pêches et la Verveine - poached pears with verbena ice cream - that the reader finally feels them relax.

Despite its occasional maladroit descriptions, the book nonetheless provides an insightful look into the workings of a world-class (and quintessentially French) restaurant. It would make for compelling armchair eating while lying on a beach this summer.??






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