Syndetics cover image
Image from Syndetics

Hungry : eating, road-tripping, and risking it all with the greatest chef in the world / Jeff Gordinier.

By: Gordinier, Jeff [author.].
Material type: TextTextDescription: 230 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.Content type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeISBN: 9781524759643; 1524759643.DDC classification: 641.5092 | B
Tags from this library: No tags from this library for this title. Log in to add tags.
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Shelving location Call number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Book Book Voorhees Nonfiction Adult 641.5092 Gor (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 05000010392277
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A food critic chronicles four years spent traveling with René Redzepi, the renowned chef of Noma, in search of the most tantalizing flavors the world has to offer.

" If you want to understand modern restaurant culture, you need to read this book."--Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums

Hungry is a book about not only the hunger for food, but for risk, for reinvention, for creative breakthroughs, and for connection. Feeling stuck in his work and home life, writer Jeff Gordinier happened into a fateful meeting with Danish chef René Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, has been called the best in the world. A restless perfectionist, Redzepi was at the top of his game but was looking to tear it all down, to shutter his restaurant and set out for new places, flavors, and recipes.

This is the story of the subsequent four years of globe-trotting culinary adventure, with Gordinier joining Redzepi as his Sancho Panza. In the jungle of the Yucatán peninsula, Redzepi and his comrades go off-road in search of the perfect taco. In Sydney, they forage for sea rocket and sandpaper figs in suburban parks and on surf-lashed beaches. On a boat in the Arctic Circle, a lone fisherman guides them to what may or may not be his secret cache of the world's finest sea urchins. And back in Copenhagen, the quiet canal-lined city where Redzepi started it all, he plans the resurrection of his restaurant on the unlikely site of a garbage-filled lot. Along the way, readers meet Redzepi's merry band of friends and collaborators, including acclaimed chefs such as Danny Bowien, Kylie Kwong, Rosio Sánchez, David Chang, and Enrique Olvera.

Hungry is a memoir, a travelogue, a portrait of a chef, and a chronicle of the moment when daredevil cooking became the most exciting and groundbreaking form of artistry.

Praise for Hungry

"In Hungry, Gordinier invokes such playful and lush prose that the scents of mole, chiles and even lingonberry juice waft off the page." -- Time

"This wonderful book is really about the adventures of two men: a great chef and a great journalist. Hungry is a feast for the senses, filled with complex passion and joy, bursting with life. Not only did Jeff Gordinier make me want to jump on the next flight (to Mexico, Copenhagen, Sydney) in search of the perfect meal, but he also reminded me to stop and savor the ride." --Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Mexico I wake up with sand in my mouth and a glare in my eyes. A man is speaking Spanish and waving a flashlight. I try to remember where I am and the details wobble into place, like a wraith making its form more visible. I hear the lapping of waves. I grope around for my backpack and my shoes. I arise from slumber on a dark beach in Tulum, the Mexican resort town. That body of water a few yards away is the Caribbean. I have been dropped here in the middle of the night at a languorous caravansary called Nueva Vida. Unable to locate my cabana, and unable to find anyone who could provide me with a key to the cabana, lost in the darkness and bereft of a phone signal and exhausted by a day that has involved a morning flight from Mexico City to Oaxaca, lunch in Oaxaca, the tour of a sprawling marketplace in Oaxaca, dinner in Oaxaca, significant quantities of mezcal, a flight from Oaxaca back to Mexico City, another flight from Mexico City to Cancún, and then a three-­hour drive through the Yucatán Peninsula to this yoga-­matted magnet for man-­bun-­and-­matcha devotees, I have surrendered to fatigue and fashioned an al fresco bed for myself in the dunes. I am within spitting distance of a sanctuary where sea turtles clamber up on shore to lay their eggs. The man with the flashlight turns out to be merciful--­at least as soon as he realizes I am not there to interfere with the sea turtles and their ancient rituals. I pour the sand out of my shoes and grab my backpack and the man leads me to a stark white room with a sea breeze ghosting the curtains and a canopy of mosquito netting over the bed. Never has a bed looked more inviting. I climb in and try to sleep, but it's only a matter of minutes before sunlight starts asserting itself through the doorframe. The only choice I have is to greet the day. I have landed here in Tulum because of the stubborn coaxing of a man named René Redzepi. Within the close-­knit world of global gastronomy, Redzepi is a figure whose influence might be compared to that of David Bowie's in music in the 1970s, or Steve Jobs's in technology in the 1980s, or Beyoncé's now. He is the chef behind Noma, a restaurant in Copenhagen that has--­for those who follow and chronicle these things--­changed the way people think about food. Writers have a habit of referring to Noma as the best restaurant on earth. That may or may not make Redzepi, by hyperbolic extension, the greatest chef alive. It is not every day that one is summoned to coffee by a cultural figure of that stature, but just such a twist of fate came to me one winter afternoon in 2014. I was working as a food writer on staff at The New York Times when an email arrived in my clogged in-­box from Peter Tittiger, an operative at Phaidon, the publishing house that had put out Redzepi's cookbook and journal--­books that were studied and parsed by chefs the way that songwriters and rock scholars had once geeked out on lyrics and liner notes. Redzepi wanted to meet me. My inclination was to say no. I can't explain why a food writer from the Times would feel compelled to decline a face-­to-­face conversation with a man reputed to be the greatest chef alive, but the older I get, the more I find it liberating to say no. Most of the existing self-­help literature seems to nudge us in that direction, doesn't it? Learn how to say no. But really I was just busy. There were multiple deadlines to juggle, there were staff meetings to endure, there were baseball games and piano recitals and family dinners to race home to. Some part of me thought, God help me, this Danish guy is going to hector me for two hours about the principles of the New Nordic movement. The New Nordic movement was the culinary juggernaut out of Scandinavia that claimed Redzepi as its chieftain. In 2004, Redzepi and his comrades, like agents of some French surrealist collective, had released a gastronomic manifesto, outlining the rules and aspirations that would govern their cooking in the years to come. Among its objectives were "to express the purity, freshness, simplicity and ethics we wish to associate with our region," and "to promote animal welfare and a sound production process in our seas, on our farmland and in the wild." In the early phase of his kitchen career, as the journalist Tienlon Ho has written: Redzepi was expected to fall in line with his mentors and cook French classics, and for a while he did. Soon, though, Redzepi had the epiphany that his food should not only be made with but entirely shaped by what he found in the forest, on the beach, and in the hands of local farmers. In practice, this meant that berries ripe for a mere two weeks a year and plucked by a Swedish farmer uninterested in selling them were more luxurious than imported caviar; he served them in a bowl with minimal adornment. He made terroir--­the soil, the climate, and the land that shape the flavor of the plant and the animal that eats it--­more than jargon. He made it the entire point of his cuisine. The impact of these ideas had escalated during half a decade, moving from the margins to a position of pulsing centrality. Pretty soon the de facto boondoggle for an American food writer was a trip to Copenhagen to go foraging on the beach with Redzepi, nibbling inquisitively on snatches of scurvy grass and sorrel, bellflowers and beach mustard. "Denmark, after all, isn't Provence or Catalonia," Frank Bruni wrote after one such reverie on the dunes. "For a locavore chef, in particular, it has limitations. But Mr. Redzepi has air-­dried, pickled, cured, foraged and researched his way around them. He has taken what could be a set of ankle weights and turned them into wings, his culinary accomplishments drawing all the more regard for the degree of geographical difficulty built into them." Inspiring stuff. Noble stuff, especially for a planet on the brink of ecological catastrophe caused, in part, by the industrial rapacity built into our food supply. I just wasn't in the mood. My marriage was falling apart. Two weeks earlier I had moved out of the house where my two children lived. Depression rolled into my days like a toxic fog. On a cold day in February I didn't think I had the patience to conjure up a rictus grin of pretend curiosity while I listened to a visionary from Copenhagen prattling on about his manifesto. Making things even more complicated, I had sort of made fun of Redzepi's ethos in the pages of the Times, even though, up until that point, I had never spoken with the man or eaten his food. In the winter of 2014, Noma's influence was running rampant in New York City, with restaurants like Aska, Acme, Atera, and Luksus promulgating their own interpretations of the New Nordic ideas that were spreading outward from Copenhagen like invasive scurvy grass. Nordicness was the new hotness and that made it a ripe target for dismissal. Noma veterans had begun colonizing the city, smoking everything with hay and garlanding plates with kelp and edible sidewalk sprigs. The chef at Acme, Mads Refslund, had even founded Noma with Redzepi--­the two cooks had come up together in culinary school--­while the chef at Luksus, a bearded Nova Scotian philosopher named Daniel Burns, had been the pastry chef at Noma for a few years. Merely having the name Noma on your résumé seemed to entice investors to throw money at you. Everybody wanted in--­except me. Up until that winter, I had not eaten in any of those restaurants. I didn't want to. My life was a mess. I felt adrift and I sought comfort in hot bowls of cacio e pepe--starch and cheese. I wanted dumplings and bibimbap and shawarma. What did I not want? As I wrote then, "For months, I dodged the question. Now and then someone would tap me on the shoulder and ask for an opinion on the latest New York restaurant that embodied the spirit of the New Nordic movement. Had I nibbled on any lichen lately? Had I dunked my spoon into a brimming bowl of barley porridge speckled with globules of pig's blood, sea buckthorn and the fermented scales of a creature found in the deepest crevasses of a fjord? The answer was no, but I felt too much shame to admit that." I was reluctant to rendezvous with this Redzepi character. My state of mind made me allergic to posturing of any sort, and I had snarked off the guy's precious movement in the world's most influential newspaper. I braced myself for a dressing-­down akin to the notorious Ned Beatty scene in Network. I imagined Redzepi scowling as he leaned across some faux farmhouse picnic table at a Greenwich Village caffeine dispensary and yelling, "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature!" Nevertheless I said yes. It was better, I figured, than milling around the office. And saying yes to the primal forces of nature, as I would come to learn during the following four years, was what René Redzepi was all about. Excerpted from Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World by Jeff Gordinier All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The hype about New Nordic cuisine may have diminished, but René Redzepi of Noma restaurant in Copenhagen remains a compelling figure. Gordinier (food and wine editor, Esquire) chronicles four years during which the author traveled with Redzepi. Chapters bounce among the United States, Mexico, Denmark, and Australia. Gordinier documents the highs and lows of Noma, from being named the best restaurant in the world to dealing with a norovirus outbreak. Just as the author undergoes a sort of rebirth following the end of his marriage, so too does Redzepi, leading to the closure and reopening of Noma. The book richly describes remarkable ingredients being turned into fantastic meals. Better still, though, Gordinier captures a sense of why such creativity in cooking matters and what the Nordic movement meant. VERDICT Part travelog, part memoir, this is a quick, delightful read difficult to categorize but easy to enjoy. Recommended for collections where memoirs and travel writing are popular.--Peter Hepburn, Coll. of the Canyons Lib., Santa Clarita, CA

Publishers Weekly Review

Esquire food editor Gordinier enchants in this alluring account of his jet-setting between Denmark, Australia, and Mexico with Noma chef René Redzepi in search of the secrets to, among other things, a mole that tastes like "an epic poem about history and time" and perfect tortillas that are "thick, chewy, redolent of corn." In the midst of marital collapse and initially skeptical of the New Nordic Noma-worship "spreading outward from Copenhagen like invasive scurvy grass," Gordinier became enamored with Redzepi and his drive "to reinvent himself and his restaurant." The author tagged along as Redzepi, a man "allergic to coasting," shuttered his world-famous restaurant and opened hyper-local pop-ups in Sydney, Australia, and Tulum, Mexico, before breaking ground on a new restaurant in Copenhagen. Gordinier catches a "contact high" off Redzepi's manic drive to use only the best ingredients from local sources ("avocado leaves that smell like liquorice" in Tulum; foraged "Neptune's necklace" seaweed in Australia), building meals "that tasted simultaneously contemporary and ancient." Along the way, Gordinier found love, learning from the charismatic chef to always "keep moving." This succulent tale of a culinary genius in search of constant transformation will enrapture Noma acolytes and travel and food enthusiasts alike. Photos. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Copenhagen restaurateur René Redzepi can never sate his compulsion to perceive novel flavors. He fashioned Noma, his many-times-lauded Danish eatery, into a temple of gastronomy sought out by globe-trotting diners eager to spend hundreds of euros to swoon over 20-course meals featuring seaweeds and fungi, many foraged by the chef from Denmark's seacoasts and wetlands. Son of an Albanian Muslim immigrant to Denmark, Redzepi trained in classical cooking before reclaiming his Nordic heritage and transporting it into uncharted culinary territory. Gordinier, food and drinks editor at Esquire, follows Redzepi's peripatetic quest to expand his palate even more, this time focusing on the world's latest epicurean hotspot: Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. A jaunt to Sydney offers a chance to seek wild celery, and Norway's frigid waters yield pristine sea urchins. The pair visit a host of chefs and home cooks, absorbing how they make the most of local ingredients, especially insects. Anyone aspiring to appreciate the borderless world of avant-garde cuisine will learn plenty about a diverse group of chefs and how these women and men are transforming the future of food.--Mark Knoblauch Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A renowned chef reveals his appetite for riskand edible insects.In 2013, Copenhagen's dining sensation, Noma, hit a serious snag: an outbreak of norovirus that threatened the restaurant's future and the reputation of its world-famous chef, Ren Redzepi. When Esquire food and drinks editor Gordinier (X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking, 2008, etc.) met Redzepi in 2014, the chef felt burned out, looking for new inspirations and, as he wrote in his journal, "scared of losing the precious worldwide attention we'd stumbled into." Eager to reinvent himself and invigorate his cooking, he decided to travel in search of new ideas, and he invited the author to come along to share in and write about the journey. At his own crossroadsdepressed over his failing marriageGordinier saw Redzepi's invitation as a gift, a recognition of his talent, and a chance to join the "fierce, focused crew" that made up the chef's entourage. The search for flavor took the group to Sydney, arctic Norway, Copenhagen, and Mexico, where Redzepi planned a pop-up, Noma Mexico, to investigate "the complexity of Mexican cuisine," flavors that long had haunted him. The author reports the chef's ecstatic response to the lush abundance of the markets: tripe, blood sausage, bags of chicken hearts, wild cherries, prickly pears, avocado leaves that smelled like licorice, wondrous tropical fruits, and "galaxies of chiles, oceans of nuts, pyramids of palm sugar, lakes of tamarind paste." "To watch Redzepi in a Mexican marketplace," Gordinier writes, "is like getting a contact high from somebody else's peyote trip." Redzepi's "kinetic fixation on propelling himself forward" characterizes the author's portrait of him: restless, "allergic to inertia," easily bored. Whenever Redzepi discovered an unfamiliar ingredient, technique, or custom, he seemed energized by "an electric current." Kelp, seawort, ant eggs, and grasshoppers are just a few of the ingredients he tried out, which for Redzepi "exemplify all meanings of the word wild' ""flavors and textures of the untamed."A vivid chronicle of a rare culinary adventure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Powered by Koha