professional cooking

I used the excuse of ordering some books for my Dad's Birthday to pick up a few for myself. "If You Can Stand the Heat", (Tales from Chefs & Restaurants) by Dawn Davis is the one I'm reading first.

Written a couple years ago, it's a pretty good overview of what's going on today in food and restaurants. It includes brief but well done interviews with chefs and food industry professionals, and manages to focus on many different aspects of the food business.

The interviews cover a wide range of topics like training, chefs as entreprenuers, restaurant location, mentors, regional cusines and such and are interesting to read as well as informative. The book also includes some recipes following each chapter, and has useful appendices with sources of information about the food business.

Among those interviewed are celebreties like Tony Bourdain, Rick Bayless, Bobby Flay and Thomas Keller but the roster consists mostly of people best known only to the inner circle of foodies.

This would be a very interesting and useful read for somebody new to food literature or thinking of entering the business.

If You Can Stand the Heat is a collection of experiences of some of the best cooks in the country. It is intended primarily for those who might be considering going into the food service industry, but is also fun and informative reading for home cooks. It covers how to get into a kitchen, what education you may need or might find useful, the basics of running the business, and even how to open your own restaurant. It also shows other resources that can be turned to for additional support and research. Each chapter also ends with a sampling of the chapter's featured cook's recipes that you probably will not want to try at home.

This collection of career profiles of well-known chefs posits itself as a guide for those who fantasize about starting restaurants themselves. Chefs ask repeatedly: Have you got the stuff?. The family who founded Boston's French-Cambodian restaurant, the Elephant Walk, recounts a story of immigration and struggle. Harvard graduate Andrew Pforzheimer, who now owns three restaurants in Connecticut, trained, among other places, at a "jewel-box" restaurant (kitchen staffed by immigrants) in Beverly Hills, and Marc Jolis of Atlanta's Cafe Sunflower studied at a culinary school. None of the chefs makes the work sound easy, although Anthony Bourdain's tales of "snorting rails of coke that we'd run from one end of the bar to the other" may appeal to some. Davis includes informational sections such as a list of the 10 culinary schools with the highest enrollment and the top four reasons that restaurants fail, according to Gary Goldberg, director of the New School's Culinary Arts program. Each chef interviewed contributes one or more recipes (Marc Jolis's Sweet and Sour Lemongrass Saffronated Pasta with Apricots and Strawberries; Alan Wong's Grilled Lamb Chops with Macadamia-Coconut Crust, Cabernet Sauvignon Jus and Coconut-Ginger Cream), which are interesting but seem discordant with the body of this fairly encyclopedic vocational tool. BOMC selection.