Elisabeth Luard

Top Dog to Kitchen Bitch

Heat

By

Jonathan Cape 318pp £17.99 order from our bookshop

Armageddon doesn’t come hotter than this. Hard on the heels of Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential – remember the bit when the fish chef gives the bride a quickie over the trash-bin?) comes Bill Buford, literary lion turned kitchen skivvy in one of Manhattan’s big-name restaurants, author of this compulsively readable addition to the literature of culinary bad boys. It gets to you, the heat. And if you can’t stand it – well, here’s one literary editor who’s man enough to take it.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Although he travels through time and space to find the best produce, his choices, delightfully, are not obvious.'… ,
    • RT : I regularly make purchases based on - it’s excellent.,
    • RT : I wrote about Yoko Ogawa's dreamlike, allegorical novel The Memory Police, newly published in English in a translat… ,
    • 'At this frankly apocalyptic moment for indigenous rights in Brazil, John Hemming’s "People of the Rainforest" is a… ,
    • 'I was dumbfounded by the view of the Berlin Wall from the eastern side. It seemed inconceivable that in under thre… ,
    • RT : Danger for ‘local’ staff, access in exchange for silence (and logos) - all sounds familiar in this fascinating look… ,
    • 'He has long been eclipsed by Vermeer, though his interiors are arguably more ambitious.' David Gelber on the Dutc… ,
    Follow Us