Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Mincemeat
WORK NOTES: trans by Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1977
WEBSITE:
CITY: L’Aquila
STATE:
COUNTRY: Italy
NATIONALITY: Italian
Born in India, raised in Italy * http://www.otherpress.com/authors/leonardo-lucarelli/ * http://www.shelf-awareness.com/max-issue.html?issue=227#m483
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016020105
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016020105
HEADING: Lucarelli, Leonardo, 1977-
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053 _0 |a PQ4912.U325
100 1_ |a Lucarelli, Leonardo, |d 1977-
670 __ |a Mincemeat, 2016: |b ECIP t.p. (Leonardo Lucarelli) data view (Italian chef and anthropologist; born in India and has since resided in regions all across Italy, including Lazio, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Trentino, and Tuscany. He entered the culinary world as a college student, and after completing a degree in anthropology, he continued his career in the kitchen. He has worked in fifteen restaurants–some Michelin-starred, and seven of which employed him as chef. Lucarelli currently lives in L’Aquila, where he consults for several restaurants in Rome)
670 __ |a Author’s flickr page, viewed April 13, 2016 |b (Leonardo Lucarelli; b. India, 1977; came to Italy at age 4; degree in conservation and restoration of cultural artifacts; ingressed in Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia della Sapienza; became photoggrapher; began a career as a chef in 2006; serves as a journalist for Motociclismo; interested in tourism)
PERSONAL
Born 1977, in India.
EDUCATION:Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia della Sapienza.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Chef, restaurant consultant, anthropologist, journalist, photographer. Motociclismo, journalist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Italian chef and anthropologist Leonardo Lucarelli was born in 1977 in India to an Italian hippie couple who were travelling through India. His family settled in Italy when he was four. In his adult life he has traveled and lived in many parts of Italy. In college, he earned a degree in anthropology in conservation and restoration of cultural artifacts, while also taking cooking classes. As a chef he has worked in fifteen restaurants, some Michelin-starred. He studied at Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia della Sapienza. He is also a photographer, restaurant consultant, and journalist for Motociclismo.
In 2016, the English translation of his memoir was released as Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, translated by Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi. The book explores Lucarelli’s life as a carefree chef traveling around Italy. He talks about his upbringing by hippie parents and a father who taught him the pleasure of cooking. He later pursued a career in cooking. In his book, he talks about lying on his resume to get waiter and cooking jobs, abusing drugs and alcohol, dating sleazy waitresses, shoplifting expensive food ingredients, dealing with nasty bosses, and dodging organized crime. He also reveals the amount of illegal employment in restaurants and crooked bosses who don’t pay. On a lighter side, Lucarelli discusses training underpaid and incompetent sous-chefs, opening restaurants, and hunting scarce Michelin stars.
In an interview on the Shelf-Awareness Website, Lucarelli explained his reason for writing his memoir: “All I wanted to do was tell the truth… What it does is describe how someone can grow in a far more complicated, dirtier, less rational world whose appeal is far less obvious than what you see on TV.” The Shelf-Awareness writer offered praise for the book, saying, “It’s not the first version of this story we’ve seen, but it’s one of the most personal and heartfelt. Lucarelli gives us a peek inside the mind of a kind of professional whose instincts tend to run counter to everyone else’s. All of which is to say: Mincemeat is a damn good memoir.”
According to a Publishers Weekly contributor, “Though a talented writer, [Lucarelli] doesn’t have the same bravado and chutzpah” as Anthony Bourdain in his comparable but better written memoir Kitchen Confidential. On the other hand, recounting the adventurous life of Lucarelli, a writer in Kirkus Reviews noted: “Wise and often very funny, the book offers sumptuous glimpses into human foibles and provides readers an unforgettable taste of the unabashedly sordid realities that underlie the high-gloss world of Italian cuisine.” Mark Knoblauch commented in Booklist: “Lucarelli’s culinary autobiography moves at breakneck speed, just like his kitchen.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 2016, Mark Knoblauch, review of Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, p. 8.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2016, review of Mincemeat.
Publishers Weekly, November 14, 2016, review of Mincemeat, p. 48.
ONLINE
Shelf-Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (November 30, 2016), author interview.*
Leonardo Lucarelli
Leonardo Lucarelli was born in 1977 to a couple who were travelling through India. He has a degree in anthropology. He occasionally interrupts his cooking activities to make long journeys by motorbike of which he publishes his reportages in various magazines. At the moment he lives and works in L’Aquila.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016: Maximum Shelf: Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef
Other Press: Mincemeat by Leonardo Lucarelli
Other Press: Mincemeat by Leonardo Lucarelli
Other Press: Mincemeat by Leonardo Lucarelli
Other Press: Mincemeat by Leonardo Lucarelli
Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef
by Leonardo Lucarelli, trans. by Lorena Rossi Gori, Danielle Rossi
In the years since Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential invented the genre of the chef tell-all, there's been a glut of food biz memoirs serving an insatiable appetite. Many of them are good--some even brilliant--and what makes the best ones stand out are the voice, characters and unique perspectives of the authors. As Bourdain himself demonstrated, it's seldom about the food.
A good memoir is often contradictory and doesn't come to neat conclusions. It allows us the pleasure of reading without contrivance or gimmick, like that goofy sprig of watercress draped over tuna tartare. In Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, debut author and chef Leonardo Lucarelli chronicles a haphazard career in professional kitchens throughout Italy, working long hours amid inept sous chefs, illegal dishwashers and unscrupulous owners, with lots of sex and prodigious amounts of drugs. It's not the first version of this story we've seen, but it's one of the most personal and heartfelt. Lucarelli gives us a peek inside the mind of a kind of professional whose instincts tend to run counter to everyone else's. All of which is to say: Mincemeat is a damn good memoir.
Lucarelli is not a celebrity chef--or at least, he wasn't when he wrote his memoir (titled Carne Trita, or ground beef, in the original Italian; "mincemeat" is something of a misnomer by the otherwise capable translators Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi). He freely admits to stumbling into his profession. Born to hippie parents in India and raised in Umbria, he went to college to study anthropology and started throwing dinner parties for friends. He lucked into his first real restaurant job with a chef who didn't examine his résumé too closely. From then on, Lucarelli careened from one failing restaurant to another, gradually honing his skills and his tolerance for drugs and alcohol. There is ample sex, too, mostly with waitresses who are judged and hired on the merits of their breasts, or for having just the right "mop of curly hair"--The restaurant industry is rife with casual misogyny, as well as homoerotic horseplay.
But it would be wrong to give Leonardo Lucarelli the mantle of bad-boy chef. Though he drives a motorcycle and insists on a black uniform (contrary to industry-standard "whites"), Lucarelli is simply too earnest to pull off the gleeful violence and nihilism that are hallmarks of some others. And that's not a bad thing. "I never get whether it's the environment that shapes people or people who shape the environment around them," he writes, describing his no-nonsense work ethic amid the chaos of the kitchen, with its odd hours and questionable employment practices. "The thing is that nobody ever suspects that a chef might have another life... probably because, if you really think about it, they never do."
Lucarelli's writing is genial and breathless. He veers between ardent stoicism and comic indignation, and he has a tendency to dispense cheeky aphorisms such as "the best medicine to treat a bad case of exhaustion and paranoia is egotism" (which he follows with, "I snorted coke until I was blue in the face..."). And his pronouncements have a sometimes loopy logic to them: "The first ten reasons why I work as a cook, hanging in there and relentlessly signing up for any job in any way connected to food, is money. If I hadn't earned enough money to let me take a year off, I'd never have graduated. If I hadn't earned enough money to buy a camera and pay for the darkroom photography course, I wouldn't be taking photos. I owe who I am to the kitchen. Therefore, the eleventh reason is gratitude." It would be annoying if he weren't so winsome.
If there is a superimposed theme in Mincemeat, it's the accidental nature of fate. Lucarelli goes wherever chance and opportunity take him, knowing that, at his level, a chef's skills are fungible. For him, cooking is perhaps a passion, but not a calling. It's refreshing to read about a chef who does not wax rhapsodic about food.
Artistic expression is not Lucarelli's primary motivator. But neither is money, despite what he says. Throughout the book are characters like endearing galoot and sous chef Michele and the hapless and conniving Vincenzo, who are foils for the high-strung and high-minded Lucarelli. The people he writes about are what give the memoir shape and make it--and his career--meaningful. He lovingly describes friendships with a care and attention usually reserved for lovers. That's what makes Mincemeat sing. Lucarelli came of age in testosterone-fueled kitchens, but it's his sensitivity and sincerity that set him apart, and will keep him in good stead if he continues to write. --Zak Nelson
Other Press, $25.95, hardcover, 320p., 9781590517918
FacebookTwitter
Other Press: Mincemeat by Leonardo Lucarelli
Leonardo Lucarelli: The Importance of Chance Encounters
Born in India to self-described hippie parents and raised in Umbria, Leonardo Lucarelli has cooked in Italian restaurants since he was a college student. Hailed as the Italian Anthony Bourdain, Lucarelli writes ardently and earnestly about his education--culinary and otherwise--in Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, newly translated and published in the U.S. by Other Press.
What made you decide to write a memoir?
In actual fact I didn't decide anything. Back in 2012 I was fleeing from a restaurant that had run me ragged. I wrote an article. Not out of anger. I just put together a few statistics and described my experiences in the kitchen. I guess it was me saying: Come on, don't believe what you see on TV. There's nothing pretentiously well-mannered or gracious in our world. Don't be wowed by the latest Master Chef recipes. Instead, give a thought to how much illegal employment there is in restaurants, how many rules are broken, and how dishwashers, cooks or even chefs are paid. Not to mention how much.
I'd never felt such a strong urge to do something in my entire life. It was picked up by a fairly popular literary website. The Italian publishing house Garzanti came across it and contacted me. I went to Milan to talk to Michele Fusilli (who would later become my editor), and he suggested I write a book. Everything that has followed, including the book's publication in the United States, is icing on the cake! I guess I deserve some of the icing, but there are many people I have to thank, starting with Michele.
What are you trying to do with this book?
All I wanted to do was tell the truth. Whenever I got stuck, Michele would say: Just let it all out! When will you get another chance to write a book about your life? So I just went ahead and told the story like you would tell co-workers over a beer late at night after the end of service.
It's not an "everything you ever wanted to know about restaurant kitchens" book. What it does is describe how someone can grow in a far more complicated, dirtier, less rational world whose appeal is far less obvious than what you see on TV.
Who, when asked who or what made them embark on this crappy life, why or when they started it, and whether it's worth persevering or not, can't come up with an answer? That's how it's been for me: fate has always played a huge role in my life and my choices. A calling? No way!
The restaurant scene you describe is testosterone-driven, filled with casual misogyny, drugs, egos, hot tempers and no contracts. Has that changed?
I don't think much has changed, although I realize I am already an "older generation" cook. Many young readers, including quite a few at hotel school, write and say they identify with the characters in my book, which is heartening. As time goes by, the drugs, drinking, hot tempers and so on tend to taper off, not because the setting has changed but because your very survival is at stake. There is a time for everything, especially if you outlive the age of fooling around.
Today "culinary schools" (which I think are mostly useless) are a dime a dozen; scions of good families flock to kitchens hoping to become the next Ramsay or Adrià. Restaurants are trying to pass themselves off as science labs. But the restaurant underworld, the throbbing heart of the business, the millions of eateries large and small where people dine daily, are the same as always, much like the ones I describe.
What aspect of writing was most difficult for you? What came easiest?
Starting was really hard. I thought my book needed structure, but where to begin? I had only ever written articles before. I hammered out a schedule; sometimes I'd skip three months of writing then bash out two chapters in one weekend. The writing process forced me to look for explanations, reasons for certain decisions I'd taken in my life, that I had never taken the time to delve into.
Whatever happens, happens, I would say to myself (or, om namah shivaia, as my mother used to say... see, there's still a bit of the hippie in me!). I wanted readers to understand why things go one way rather than another; the importance of chance encounters, dreams, fate, deliberate choices, circumstances. But, above all, the people around you.
Incidentally, my first child was born in 2013, the same month I started writing the chapter that I sent to the publishers to decide if it was going to be worth writing this book or not. As he started growing so did the story.
You say that "doing a job you love is a punishment." Tell us more about that. Do you have any plans to put your photography skills to use?
When you do a job you love, that you're passionate about, whether it's cooking or carpentry or running a business, you sometimes get a niggling feeling that you're missing out on all the other great occupations you might have been attracted to at least once in your life. However, or perhaps fortunately, in order to believe we can do something we need others to define our worth and validate our results. So we forge on and create our destiny.
I've always cared about being well-regarded. I wrote the book without overthinking where it would end up, but now that it's doing so unexpectedly well I almost feel a duty--a responsibility--to keep writing. You have to have a healthy dose of self-confidence to stomach disappointing the world's expectations. I never have, although I'm still taking photos and thinking that one day I just might work for UNICEF in Angola.
Can I say here just one thing in Italian? La questione è che diventando molto bravo in qualcosa inevitabilmente cresce la nostalgia per tutto quello che non potrai più essere.
You paraphrase Anthony Bourdain at one point, and Mincemeat shares a lot in common with Kitchen Confidential.
I certainly can't deny his influence. I remember the first time I read Kitchen Confidential: it was in July 2003. I should have been cramming for my university exams but I had just started working as a sous chef in Rome to pay the legal fees for an upcoming court case. [That book] literally shook my world. In it I found everything: everything I knew and imagined and hoped and feared. And some other stuff, too. It shone a spotlight on the violent, narcissistic, foul-mouthed, poetic, nihilistic and exciting world I had only barely glimpsed in the kitchen.
If at a certain point I decided I really did want to become a chef, I owe it partly to that book. And I know I'm not the only one. How could I fail to acknowledge him? It would be hypocritical.
Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?
Who knows? My son is three now, so in 10 years' time my main occupation will probably be being a dad. Hopefully a dad with a passion for travel, so my son grows up knowing that the world is an amazing, confused and confusing place full of people with different customs and habits. And excellent food. Mincemeat might help me achieve that. This is definitely a watershed. Who'd have thought a couple of years ago that I'd be here now, answering your questions? --Zak Nelson, writer and bookseller
Leonardo Lucarelli
Leonardo Lucarelli was born in 1977 to a couple who were travelling through India. He has a degree in anthropology. He occasionally interrupts his cooking activities to make long journeys by motorbike of which he publishes his reportages in various magazines. At the moment he lives and works in L’Aquila.
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Print Marked Items
Lucarelli, Leonardo: MINCEMEAT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lucarelli, Leonardo MINCEMEAT Other Press (Adult Nonfiction) $25.95 12, 6 ISBN: 978-1-59051-791-8
An Italian chef's no-holds-barred memoir of his love-hate relationship with cooking and the cutthroat world of
restaurant cuisine.The India-born son of "Italian hippies," Lucarelli stumbled into his profession at age 19 when he told
Sandro, a man who had just lost his sous-chef, that he knew "how to cook a little." His experience was greater than
Lucarelli let on: at home, his father had shown him how to turn "cooking into pleasure." Though an impoverished
university student in Rome at the time, he began to work in the kitchen; the author's adroitness as a shoplifter allowed
him to buy expensive foods he used for culinary experiments popular among his friends. Lucarelli never intended on
making cooking a career, but the next job that followed--for which he submitted a resume "jam-packed with blatant
lies"--was also in the kitchen. As he moved from restaurant to restaurant in Rome and northern Italy, he quickly learned
that while the food business never guaranteed security, it also never lacked for colorful characters, such as bosses who
could never be trusted to pay on time (or even at all) and co-workers "with troubled pasts and present lives wasted by
drugs and alcohol." In between screaming at other chefs, finding and losing jobs, dating sleazy waitresses, drinking,
and doing drugs, Lucarelli also learned how to set up and organize restaurant kitchens and menus. Yet rather than
continue to follow the tortured and chaotic path to culinary stardom, he fell in love with a "very shy girl" named
Giuliana. Together, they had a son, who taught Lucarelli that the most meaningful life emphasized family over the
pursuit of egoistical pleasures like opening his own restaurant and relentlessly running after Michelin star-glory. Wise
and often very funny, the book offers sumptuous glimpses into human foibles and provides readers an unforgettable
taste of the unabashedly sordid realities that underlie the high-gloss world of Italian cuisine. A wickedly candid
memoir.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Lucarelli, Leonardo: MINCEMEAT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329135&it=r&asid=4e144de70c32a04f003342ed008a8f9f.
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Leonardo Lucarelli, Lorena Rossi Gori, Danielle
Rossi: MINCEMEAT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Leonardo Lucarelli, Lorena Rossi Gori, Danielle Rossi MINCEMEAT Other Press (Adult Nonfiction) 25.95 ISBN:
978-1-59051-791-8
An Italian chef’s no-holds-barred memoir of his love-hate relationship with cooking and the cutthroat world
of restaurant cuisine.The India-born son of “Italian hippies,” Lucarelli stumbled into his profession
at age 19 when he told Sandro, a man who had just lost his sous-chef, that he knew “how to cook a
little.” His experience was greater than Lucarelli let on: at home, his father had shown him how to turn
“cooking into pleasure.” Though an impoverished university student in Rome at the time, he began
to work in the kitchen; the author’s adroitness as a shoplifter allowed him to buy expensive foods he used for
culinary experiments popular among his friends. Lucarelli never intended on making cooking a career, but the next job
that followed—for which he submitted a resume “jam-packed with blatant
lies”—was also in the kitchen. As he moved from restaurant to restaurant in Rome and northern Italy,
he quickly learned that while the food business never guaranteed security, it also never lacked for colorful characters,
such as bosses who could never be trusted to pay on time (or even at all) and co-workers “with troubled pasts
and present lives wasted by drugs and alcohol.” In between screaming at other chefs, finding and losing jobs,
dating sleazy waitresses, drinking, and doing drugs, Lucarelli also learned how to set up and organize restaurant
kitchens and menus. Yet rather than continue to follow the tortured and chaotic path to culinary stardom, he fell in love
with a “very shy girl” named Giuliana. Together, they had a son, who taught Lucarelli that the most
meaningful life emphasized family over the pursuit of egoistical pleasures like opening his own restaurant and
relentlessly running after Michelin star–glory. Wise and often very funny, the book offers sumptuous glimpses
into human foibles and provides readers an unforgettable taste of the unabashedly sordid realities that underlie the highgloss
world of Italian cuisine. A wickedly candid memoir.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Leonardo Lucarelli, Lorena Rossi Gori, Danielle Rossi: MINCEMEAT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551385&it=r&asid=f278379e1b40abd3a2fe5ab2f8a7c89b.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
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Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef
Publishers Weekly.
263.46 (Nov. 14, 2016): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef Leonardo Lucarelli, trans. from the Italian by Lorena Rossi Gori and
Danielle Rossi. Other Press, $25.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-59051-791-8
Italian chef and consultant Lucarelli has worked in kitchens ranging from holes in the wall to chic Michelin-starred
eateries. Though he doesn't revisit all of them, he gives readers a glimpse at the day-to-day lives of those working the
line under harsh conditions. It's a story that's been told, and told better, many times before. Lucarelli's tale includes lots
of drugs, cops, lurid sex, busy nights, short fuses, and high stakes. He offers insight into what it really takes to not only
become a chef but sustain a career, in addition to moments of solipsistic reflection. The urge to compare the book to
Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential is inevitable, and under that scrutiny Lucarelli's work falls far short. His
themes are similar to Bourdain's, but his book is a lesser version of the same story. Lucarelli, though a talented writer,
doesn't have the same bravado and chutzpah. Those in the restaurant and hospitality industry will likely recognize
themselves in some of the book's vignettes. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 48. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473459034&it=r&asid=8516d71e322d866f5b24c93e4bc06849.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
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Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef
Mark Knoblauch
Booklist.
113.6 (Nov. 15, 2016): p8.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef. By Leonardo Lucarelli. Tr. by Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi.
Dec. 2016. 320p. Other, $25.95 (9781590517918). 641.5092.
Not all chefs spring from the world's culinary academies. Some stumble into the profession through accident or good
fortune and then discover that they have a talent not only for putting good food on customers' plates but also for
succeeding in the daunting, chaotic world of the restaurant kitchen. Such has been the career of Lucarelli, who debuted
in Rome as a waiter solely to garner a few euros. Or so he thought. He soon found himself in the kitchen and started
cooking, learning fast from chefs who put up with his high jinks, his drug use, and his womanizing. He gained enough
experience to sign on to cook in a restaurant that's in fact a boat anchored in the Tiber. Despite catastrophes as he
learned to deal with impossible demands of both chefs and patrons, Lucarelli discovered he actually enjoyed the chef's
life. Translated from the Italian, Lucarelli's culinary autobiography moves at breakneck speed, just like his kitchen.--
Mark Knoblauch
Knoblauch, Mark
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Knoblauch, Mark. "Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 8. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473788141&it=r&asid=c50eeb91674d68e6c81a4120a8ca18bd.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
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Other press gets cooking
Rachel Deahl
Publishers Weekly.
262.38 (Sept. 21, 2015): p10.
COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Judith Gurewich at Other Press preempted world English rights to Mincemeat: The Making of an Italian Cook by
Leonardo Lucarelli, in a deal brokered by Paolo Zaninoni at Garzanti Libri. In the work, Lucarelli, a professional chef
and anthropologist, "sketches with the wit and pace of an Italian Anthony Bourdain the dangerous and exhilarating life
behind the closed doors of good and bad restaurants, while revealing how he found structure and discipline in the
unlikely work ethics of the kitchen," according to the publisher. The book is set for release in November 2016.
Deahl, Rachel
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Deahl, Rachel. "Other press gets cooking." Publishers Weekly, 21 Sept. 2015, p. 10. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA429736590&it=r&asid=31c8dc00af80be2fe127224f439f8173.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A429736590
Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef
by Leonardo Lucarelli, trans. by Lorena Rossi Gori, Danielle Rossi
In the years since Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential invented the genre of the chef tell-all, there's been a glut of food biz memoirs serving an insatiable appetite. Many of them are good--some even brilliant--and what makes the best ones stand out are the voice, characters and unique perspectives of the authors. As Bourdain himself demonstrated, it's seldom about the food.
A good memoir is often contradictory and doesn't come to neat conclusions. It allows us the pleasure of reading without contrivance or gimmick, like that goofy sprig of watercress draped over tuna tartare. In Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, debut author and chef Leonardo Lucarelli chronicles a haphazard career in professional kitchens throughout Italy, working long hours amid inept sous chefs, illegal dishwashers and unscrupulous owners, with lots of sex and prodigious amounts of drugs. It's not the first version of this story we've seen, but it's one of the most personal and heartfelt. Lucarelli gives us a peek inside the mind of a kind of professional whose instincts tend to run counter to everyone else's. All of which is to say: Mincemeat is a damn good memoir.
Lucarelli is not a celebrity chef--or at least, he wasn't when he wrote his memoir (titled Carne Trita, or ground beef, in the original Italian; "mincemeat" is something of a misnomer by the otherwise capable translators Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi). He freely admits to stumbling into his profession. Born to hippie parents in India and raised in Umbria, he went to college to study anthropology and started throwing dinner parties for friends. He lucked into his first real restaurant job with a chef who didn't examine his résumé too closely. From then on, Lucarelli careened from one failing restaurant to another, gradually honing his skills and his tolerance for drugs and alcohol. There is ample sex, too, mostly with waitresses who are judged and hired on the merits of their breasts, or for having just the right "mop of curly hair"--The restaurant industry is rife with casual misogyny, as well as homoerotic horseplay.
But it would be wrong to give Leonardo Lucarelli the mantle of bad-boy chef. Though he drives a motorcycle and insists on a black uniform (contrary to industry-standard "whites"), Lucarelli is simply too earnest to pull off the gleeful violence and nihilism that are hallmarks of some others. And that's not a bad thing. "I never get whether it's the environment that shapes people or people who shape the environment around them," he writes, describing his no-nonsense work ethic amid the chaos of the kitchen, with its odd hours and questionable employment practices. "The thing is that nobody ever suspects that a chef might have another life... probably because, if you really think about it, they never do."
Lucarelli's writing is genial and breathless. He veers between ardent stoicism and comic indignation, and he has a tendency to dispense cheeky aphorisms such as "the best medicine to treat a bad case of exhaustion and paranoia is egotism" (which he follows with, "I snorted coke until I was blue in the face..."). And his pronouncements have a sometimes loopy logic to them: "The first ten reasons why I work as a cook, hanging in there and relentlessly signing up for any job in any way connected to food, is money. If I hadn't earned enough money to let me take a year off, I'd never have graduated. If I hadn't earned enough money to buy a camera and pay for the darkroom photography course, I wouldn't be taking photos. I owe who I am to the kitchen. Therefore, the eleventh reason is gratitude." It would be annoying if he weren't so winsome.
If there is a superimposed theme in Mincemeat, it's the accidental nature of fate. Lucarelli goes wherever chance and opportunity take him, knowing that, at his level, a chef's skills are fungible. For him, cooking is perhaps a passion, but not a calling. It's refreshing to read about a chef who does not wax rhapsodic about food.
Artistic expression is not Lucarelli's primary motivator. But neither is money, despite what he says. Throughout the book are characters like endearing galoot and sous chef Michele and the hapless and conniving Vincenzo, who are foils for the high-strung and high-minded Lucarelli. The people he writes about are what give the memoir shape and make it--and his career--meaningful. He lovingly describes friendships with a care and attention usually reserved for lovers. That's what makes Mincemeat sing. Lucarelli came of age in testosterone-fueled kitchens, but it's his sensitivity and sincerity that set him apart, and will keep him in good stead if he continues to write. --Zak Nelson
Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef
Image of Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef
Author(s):
Leonardo Lucarelli
Release Date:
December 5, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
Other Press
Pages:
352
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Reviewed by:
Paul LaRosa
Oh, to be Anthony Bordain! Many chefs hope to emulate the swash-buckling, glove-traveling lovable rogue who makes his bones by bearing the truth of the chef-making-and-breaking industry with Kitchen Confidential.
And now comes Leonardo Lucarelli attempting to ascend these heights. But hard as he might try to entertain us with stories of his coke-sniffing, fornicating, and suffering-in-the-kitchen nights, Lucarelli is no Anthony Bordain.
Part of the problem is that Bordain was the first to stake his claim to the chef-as-rogue title. All those who follow suffer by comparison because Anthony is so Bordain. He’s created a field unto himself.
But Lucarelli’s revelations don’t resonate simply because his stories are exactly the ones you expect. This is well-trod ground. In nonfiction, a much better book is Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter. In fiction, you might want to pick up Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, which has made some “best books of” lists this year.
It’s not that Lucarelli fails as writer. He can hold his own as he shows in this scene after a particularly hectic night.
“I was soaked to the skin. My uniform was spattered with sauce and starch from the pasta water. My side towel was nowhere to be seen, my hands were red and sweaty, and in the kitchen, it looked like a huge arancini kamikaze had blown itself up. And we were the victims.”
Nice. And sometimes, he finds himself in the land of the poetic.
“You continue to work in a kitchen because chefs are the fifth quarter of Roman cuisine, an oxymoron, the offal that most people regard as waste, but is the only part of the animal that distinguishes a real chef from a wannabe, and someone who knows how to live from someone who doesn’t.”
The problem is that one grows weary of reading how he prepares a dinner, how he shops, who he screws and gets high with. And while we might suspect it, do we really want to know that he and his kitchen comrades spit viciously into the dish of someone they detest?
Check, please!
Paul LaRosa's most recent book is a memoir, Leaving Story Avenue. He is also a journalist whose work, including book reviews across a wide range of genres, has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, and on CBS News.
The Heat and the Hustle: Leonardo Lucarelli
By Giancarlo Buonomo
84 0 1
FEBRUARY 9, 2017
WHEN I TOLD GIANNI, an acquaintance who owns a wine bar in Rome, that I was reviewing a memoir by an Italian chef, he responded with amused confusion. “Why would anyone want to read a book by a chef?” he asked. “Is he going to tell you how he got all those burns on his arms?” I was surprised by his reaction. Having lived in Italy for some time, I can attest that Italians earn their reputation for being food-obsessed. Of course, not everyone grows their own tomatoes or raises their own pigs, or even visits the butcher shop every day (I even know many who do their food shopping in the supermarket). Still, Italians approach the preparation and eating of meals in the company of friends and family with a reverence that can only be described as religious. In Italy, dining, like sex, is a universal pleasure, one everybody enjoys and about which everyone has strong opinions. I once observed two middle-aged Italian couples conversing in a swingers club, scoping each other out for a potential partner swap. The topic of their conversation was spaghetti with clams, more specifically, where in Rome one could buy the best vongole veraci (tiny flat-shelled clams). The debate definitely ended in a temporary compromise, if not in total agreement.
It turns out it’s this very obsession with food that causes an Italian like Gianni to smirk at the idea of a chef memoir. Almost everyone in Italy believes themselves to be more than competent in the kitchen. Combine this culinary confidence with a food culture that prides tradition over innovation, and the gap between home cook and professional just isn’t as wide as it is in the United States.
And yet. Leonardo Lucarelli, a 20-year veteran of Italian restaurants, would disagree. In his new memoir, Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, he writes:
Most people can’t cook, haven’t a clue where to start, and don’t even know what good food is. All they have is a hazy recollection of wonderful Sunday lunches at Grandma’s (bearing in mind that not all grandmas know how to cook) […] we, on the other side of the swinging door, know how to rustle up reassuring dishes that are beyond the capabilities of people who do not work in a commercial kitchen.
However his book, published in Italy in January 2016 and in English last December, is not just about the difference in skill between chef and diner. It’s also about our choices, conscious and unconscious, and how they inform who we are. Born in India to artist parents and raised in Umbria, Lucarelli ambles into his first cooking gig as a cash-strapped university student in Rome in 1996. After that, he drifts in and out of kitchens for years; the culinary life appeals to him in the way that war appeals to others — the heat and hustle, the scars and burns like fleshy medals, the foxhole camaraderie, the addictive feeling of invincibility, and sensuous days framed by “porcini mushrooms and fresh fish arriving at the crack of dawn and the moist panties of waitresses at the end of the day.” He believes that writing and photography are his real occupations (he’s a published journalist), but he always returns to restaurant work — sometimes because he is broke, but more often because he misses the rush. He explains that he titled his memoir Mincemeat because the “meat grinder” environment can destroy, but can also be transformative; a restaurant kitchen is a place where scraps are converted into edible delights, and misfits into master craftsmen.
Of course, the unconventional life of the narrator is a convention of the chef memoir. Anthony Bourdain’s watershed Kitchen Confidential, Bill Buford’s gonzo Heat, Gabrielle Hamilton’s poetic Blood, Bones & Butter, and Michael Ruhlman’s immersion The Making of a Chef are all concerned not just with the preparation of food, but with the personal (and peculiar) lives of their authors. Fingertips lost to various kitchen apparatus, cocaine snorted from others, are as expected in these accounts as car chases and leggy blondes in a James Bond film. It seems, at first, that Lucarelli’s subtitle — The Education of an Italian Chef — promises something new: an account of how one learns to cook professionally, with an emphasis on Italian food. Even when faithfully translated from the original Italian — to read simply “The Education of a Cook” — the reader is likely to expect something different, and equally compelling: an account of the author’s professional coming of age. Unfortunately, Mincemeat delivers on neither subtitle’s promise. Though this is a book that largely happens in Rome, on the Roman food scene, the reader learns remarkably little about either. The gaze of Lucarelli’s writing is so inward that he never manages to paint a clear picture of where he is, either physically or historically. Instead, we mostly follow Lucarelli from job to job; little time is spent on the larger industry that he works in, or on the notable people in that world. It’s as if this narrative were one long letter to a close friend, where the details of people and places were assumed to be already known.
Much of this effect is due to the surprisingly dull (sometimes altogether absent) descriptions of the food in the book. For example, a young Lucarelli lands a job at a respected Roman trattoria whose crusty proprietor, Arturo, “[makes] a meatloaf that [is] the stuff of legends.” But that’s the last we hear of the meatloaf — we never even learn what type of meat it’s made with. And when Lucarelli does mention individual dishes, the translation, done by Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi, disappoints. Case in point, that meatloaf again: in Italian, it’s actually a Polpettone — a recipe with an altogether different preparation and history. Perhaps this sort of simplification is supposed to help the reader, but it alienates the food from its setting instead.
Mincemeat does include moments where Lucarelli is insightful about the life of a chef. He is frank, for instance, about the narcissistic, near-sexual power a chef wields over his customers, as he watches them “knowing that their satisfaction or disappointment is all up to [him].” Finally, though, the best parts of the book, are the ones where the focus is not on food or cooking but on people. In one scene, Lucarelli finds himself running a kitchen that only employs residents from a nearby halfway house, including a cook called Marco. One afternoon, after criticizing Marco’s pastry cream (“This pastry cream is shit, it’s absolutely disgusting”), Lucarelli asks him why he was originally incarcerated. Marco replies that he killed a loan shark in self-defense, and doesn’t regret it: “That asshole deserved to die,” he says. “Forget what I said about the pastry cream,” quips Lucarelli in response. “Yours is fantastic.”
And then there’s Joseph, a Pakistani dishwasher living illegally in Rome, who returns home in the afternoons to say good night to the children he has left behind in a different time zone.
This he did like all immigrants: Seated on a plastic stool in front of an ancient computer on a table made of chipboard in a room shared with five other people, he would sign into Skype, draw his face nearer to the monitor, and wait. The connection was slow, the voices choppy, and the image of the two children often froze, but since the arrival of Skype, everything seemed easier and closer. Before that there had been only letters, a few photographs, and the weekly remittances.
Scenes like these have little to do with food or the technical prowess of chefs. But through a few well-chosen details, Lucarelli creates moments that would fit in any book, and be worth reading in any language.
¤
Giancarlo Buonomo is a freelance journalist in Rome.
Review
Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef
written by Leonardo Lucarelli, translated by Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi
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Culinary figures are now rock stars. They own and promote restaurants, books and cooking devices with great passion and financial success. While Italian chef Leonardo Lucarelli may not be one of the well-known celebrity chefs of the world, his memoir is an enticing and enjoyable behind-the-scenes examination of the life of kitchen masterminds.
Lucarelli is not well-known outside of Italy. To my knowledge, he has never had a cooking show on American television or on Food Network. Until I turned to the dust jacket and viewed his photo, I had never seen him before. In 2013, the Italian magazine Il Reportage published Lucarelli’s article that lifted the curtain on the life of a world-class chef, exposing moonlighting, exploitation of workers and a general lack of concern about legal niceties in the industry. Italians apparently take the details of their restaurant operations seriously, and the article became popular on many websites. It also served as the inspiration for MINCEMEAT, which is part biography, part exposé and part cooking saga.
"I assume Lucarelli writes as he cooks, with heart and soul and attention to gritty detail. MINCEMEAT is intelligent, entertaining and a true glimpse of the craziness that goes on in kitchens around the world."
Lucarelli has the self-awareness and confidence necessary to be a chef. He notes that these days chefs are hip: “Those big glass widows and open kitchens are there to give naïve and gullible diners the impression they are seeing what actually goes on inside.” But there is quite a bit more that goes on behind the scenes. In an exuberant and boisterous style, Lucarelli takes us behind those doors. He writes in bursts of enthusiasm moving from story to story and interspersing personal tales with those of his profession. It is almost as though David Foster Wallace donned a chef’s hat and apron.
Becoming a chef was not Lucarelli’s career ambition. He was born in India while his parents were visiting there. He grew up in Umbria, moving to Rome to study anthropology in college. He began working in kitchens to support himself in school, and repeatedly embellished his work record to obtain jobs in the kitchen. He often boasted of work experience that he never accomplished and moved to better positions in the kitchen hierarchy. After completion of his education in 2006, Lucarelli managed his first restaurant. His accurate resume is now impressive, with 15 different positions in 15 Italian establishments from Tuscany to Trentino, two of which were Michelin-starred restaurants. Currently Lucarelli lives in Abruzzo, consulting for many restaurants in Rome and writing for travel magazines.
Reading MINCEMEAT may give you second thoughts about sitting down to a meal in a restaurant. Between undocumented and inexperienced employees, illicit romantic encounters, drugs, criminal activity and a few other questionable activities, there is wonderment that the food even comes out of the kitchen and that it is fit for consumption. But it does, and perhaps the best analogy is a food analogy often heard in politics: “You simply do not want to see the sausage being made, you just want to enjoy it.” This memoir is comical yet also heartbreaking with the occasional poignant story. Lucarelli captures the rush of the high pressure that accompanies work in the kitchen. Somehow the food gets plated and presented, and the customers are satisfied.
I assume Lucarelli writes as he cooks, with heart and soul and attention to gritty detail. MINCEMEAT is intelligent, entertaining and a true glimpse of the craziness that goes on in kitchens around the world.
Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman on December 16, 2016
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Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef
written by Leonardo Lucarelli, translated by Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi
Publication Date: December 6, 2016
Genres: Cooking, Memoir, Nonfiction
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Other Press
ISBN-10: 1590517911
ISBN-13: 9781590517918