The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

[KristiB50]

I'm enjoying this book and now I need to go to China and eat!

It's about a recently widowed American food writer who travels to China to settle a paternity suit against her late husband and profile a Chinese/American chef living in China.

The chef, Sam, is a decendent of a famous Chinese chef and is translating his book and trying to open a restaurant in Bejing. He struggles because he cooks the old fashioned way while the popular chefs in Bejing are moving forward with fusion and innovation.

The descriptions of food make my mouth water, and the exerpts from Liang Wei's book, The Last Chinese Chef, are fascinating.

The author lived in China for 18 years and captures the meaning of food and the culinary arts there.

I've only had Chinese/American food and now I'm feeling deprived

[KristiB50]

Interesting interview about Chinese cuisine HERE

Tour schedule including one with an authentic Chinese banquet HERE

I wish I could go to the banquet but I will go to the signing here. I want to ask her if the "healing chicken" dish she describes is real. The chef prepares it for the main character when he senses her grief and the description seems impossible.

Edited June 3, 2007 by KristiB50 (log)

[Carrot Top]

Sounds like an interesting book.

Let us know what you find out at the signing. The banquet would be fun, wouldn't it.

[fyfas]

I bought this on a recco from a woman who was a script reader for me at Universal Studios who had just read it/couldn't put in down.

The author, Nicole Mones, wrote LOST IN TRANSLATION which went on to be a well regarded 2003 film that starred Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray and was directed by Sofia Coppola thus I was interested.

All of that said, this is an absolutely terrific book that would have fallen beneath my "radar". It is about a food writer who scoffs at the notion that "food can heal the human heart". Writer Mones proves her wrong.

Just fwiw, apparently the book was excepted in Gourmet, first time they've ever done that. I subscribe but I missed it.

Edited June 3, 2007 by fyfas (log)

[Carrot Top]

"Sumptuous... Mones's descriptions of fine cuisine are tantalizing, and her protagonist's quest is bracing and unburdened by melodrama.  Early in her visit, Maggie scoffs at the idea that food can heal the human heart. Mones smartly proves her wrong."

-PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Interesting proposition. A sort of a spiritual or romantic quest of the heart that is answered by food.

I've read several things exploring this idea lately - one where a woman who is having an affair turns to fulsomely cooking intensely wonderful things for everyone around her, and how she did not do this before the affair and did not do it after the affair was ended.

Another, where a man who is emotionally remote shows that by his eating habits in choosing separation from the "norm" of those around him by becoming vegan who then decides at some point in his life that he wants not to be emotionally remote so then enters into the world of eating as others do around him.

These sorts of stories do remind me of religious "testimony", as when people stand up in churches and claim they have been "saved".

Worthy of thought.