Customer Reviews

The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooks in the Age of Celebrity

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When Ruhlman sticks to descriptions of the working of a restaurant kitchen, the food, and the chef, his writing is engaging and compelling. Unfortunately he has a tendency to lapse into discussing his own feelings about cooking and how profoundly his life was changed by writing about it, and when he does this he gets pretentious and repetitive. In his 2 previous book on the subject, Making of a Chef and Soul of a Chef, this was also true but in Reach of a Chef there is so much of it that it made the book hard to get through. How many times can you read about how veal stock changed his life before gagging? It also seems like he was lacking material and so added large sections that simply rehashed the material in the 2 first books, like a review in case you hadn't read them. Overall, about half of this book was interesting, new material; the rest wasn't even worth the time it took me to skim through.