The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen, by Michael Ruhlman

   

Read
This one took me a few weeks to get through.  It's broken into multiple, easily digestible chunks, but for some reason I found myself waiting several days in between readings.

Bottom Line
A good read for anyone interested in the world of the kitchen.

Full Review
I picked this up because Kitchen Confidential was checked out and the copy on the front flap of the jacket looked interesting.  Ruhlman is a professional food writer who's been to culinary school (the CIA, or Culinary Institute of America) and spends a great deal of time hobnobbing with some of the country's most famous celebrity chefs.  There are a few points in the book where he belabors this point a little (do I really want or need to know about the night he spend drinking with Anthony Bourdain?), but on the whole he uses these connections to research and write what is really a great overview of where the chefs of America are today.

The book is a kind of follow up to his previous works; his goal is to see how the world of the professional chef had expanded since he started writing in the mid '90s.  The book jumps a bit, first giving in depth character profiles of figures the author finds interesting, from the current head of the CIA to a chef in Chicago doing wild experiments with food to a chef in Maine serving more traditional fare straight from her garden.  These profiles are interesting, giving the reader a cross section of what the work of a chef is really like, without any of the glamour or pizzaz that the Food Network specializes in.

Then he gets to the marketing stuff, the way a chef expands his reach.  If you're not a chef interested in producing and marketing a brand, you can skim through this section.  I did.  I also found this to be the most disturbing part of the book, as it accentuates the current state of affairs in the culinary world, that is to say, the divorce of the chef and the kitchen.  Although Ruhlman doesn't lay it out as clearly as he could, the bottom line is obvious: chefs don't make money.  There's a great bit where he talks about profit margins in the restaurant industry, which are about as slim as you can get and still have a viable business.  This is what drives chefs to expand - restaurants in New York, Vegas, Napa - not to mention the sauces, spices, kitchen knives, and dinnerware.

While I found this a bit slow to read - somewhat dense and ponderous at times - it was well worth the time invested.