Minnesota Reads

Gabrielle Hamilton’s food memoir Blood, Bones & Butter is a bit of a sleeper. It starts with pleasant and wholesome childhood memories in a big old house on plenty of acreage, parked under mother’s chin listening to her talk, watching her prepare huge feasts. Then Whammo! It’s girls gone wild. Age deception, booze, drugs, alternative [...]

Food writers, especially good ones, are at such an advantage. They have every sense available to them, and if they know what they are doing, they have the opportunity to make a reader cavort and drool with their words. Midway through the first chapter of the rock and roll food writer Anthony Bourdain’s super visceral [...]

Minneapolis's own Hell's Kitchen is no relation to the television show of same name but it is just as intense, and reading the story behind its success is even better than watching Chef Ramsay yell. The vivacious chef and owner of our local hellish hotspot is Mitch Omer. He joins literary forces with Ann Bauer, [...]

Never Trust a Thin Cook is best described as an epicurious travelogue. It focuses more on the joy of food and cooking traditions than on specific recipes. Essentially, it is a diary of an American living abroad. Author, Eric Dregni puts this tale in play when he walks away from the popular south Minneapolis eatery, [...]

“Chefs are the new rock stars” is a catchphrase that gains momentum every time Andrew Zimmern plugs his mouth with an obscure, barely dead mollusk or the broiled sex organs of an animal unique to New Zealand. The cast of “America’s Next Top Chef” is a limping gallery of jail house tattoos, stealing pulls off [...]

Frank Bruni was a looming presence in a book published in 2007 chronicling the Manhattan restaurant Per Se’s hopes for a four-star review from the New York Times tough-ass food critic. The writer, Phoebe Damrosch, was a hostess-turned-server, and one of her story’s central conflicts and obsessions was spotting Bruni when he came into the [...]

After reading food-memoir-Julia-Child-love-letter-turned-movie Julie & Julia by Julie Powell, I have two regrets: A) I wish I had come up with an idea like this. But not this one. I’m never going to eat liver, let alone saw away at a bone to get to that succulent marrow. And you’ll be hard-pressed in this book [...]

In the 1990s, Ruth Reichl was courted by, and eventually became the food critic for the New York Times — albeit reluctantly. On her first tentative trip to the food capital of the world from her home in Los Angeles, she is recognized by her seatmate. There is seemingly a bounty on the potential critic’s [...]

Typically when I read a book, I dog-ear pages with great sentences or ideas I like. With Giulia Melucci’s unfortunately-titled food memoir I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti, these notations were never about a turn of phrase — they were about a turn of the proverbial spatula. There are at least a dozen recipes [...]