The Last Days of Haute Cuisine

by Patric Kuh

Book Overview

"Essential reading for all serious foodies."--Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential Combining an insider's passion with down-to-earth humor, chef and food writer Patric Huk traces the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670891789
• ISBN13: 9780670891788
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

The Last Days of Haute Cuisine

Patric Kuh is a food critic for Los Angeles Magazine currently, although he has been a chef and has traveled widely. He grew up in Spain and Ireland, then headed to France to learn cooking. He spent some time working in the kitchen of "21" in New York and then for a San Francisco couple before ending up in Los Angeles. This book describes and explains the evolution of fine cuisine in the United States from the introduction of French cooking in the 1939 Chicago World's Fair to the foundation of Alice Water's Chez Panisse (and beyond). The writing is lucid and interesting. Highly recommended.

An insightful history

I wanted some light reading for a vacation & grabbed this book. Once I started, I couldn't put it down. There I was, on vacation, doing just what I could have done at home -- reading a book.Though many chefs and restauranteurs are profiled or interviewed, it's definitely not a collection of celebrity interviews. Nor is it about kitchen philosophies or tips for success. Rather, it's a social analysis of the entire idea of cuisine. Food is only a third of it: economics, class, socio-political movements, entrepreneurship, and the immigrant experience make up the rest of Kuh's subject. He tracks the changes in top-tier American restauranting from the eyes of owners, chefs, patrons, food critics, cookbook writers, and economic statistics. What emerges is a portrait of a cyclic symbiosis of purveyor and audience. Restauranteurs challenge the notion of what food is to be; the public absorbs the notion and changes it in a uniquely American way, which then facilitates the next generation of restaurants. It might sound dry (and there are indeed a few dry spots), but overall it's engaging, personal, and interesting.As others have noted, occasionally an overly-abstract sentence might leave you scratching your head, but that wasn't nearly enough for me to knock off a star. I thought this was a fine book.

A Perfect Birthday Gift

tomorow is my 72 birthday. Ms Kuh's excerpt is a recollection very familiar to me. I have dined at Druant at the Ritz,New york,Paris ,etc. My 18th birthday luncheon was held at Colony. Ishared lunch with my father on his 50 birthday at Pavillion. The menus described and the manner of service will introduce her readers to a very real and wonderful world that is gone and thanks to her are not forgotten. Thankyou for all of the delightful nostalgia.I can visuallize the Trylon and the Perisphere even a I type.

The American Synthesis

The usefulness of this well-written--if uneven--book lies in its description of the emergence of the modern American concept of a restaurant. The story of the emergence of Restaurant Associates and the company's influence on today's restaurants is a story that has not been told before. From a restaurant model imposed from France (ultimately untenable), and all of the poorly executed imitations in every regional city in America, has emerged the American synthesis balancing innovation, profitability,and popularity. The real thread of Kuh's story is not about food enthusiasts or how Julia Child changed home cooking or how M.F.K. Fisher became a spiritual guru to foodies everywhere. It is about the change in the profession of restaurant management and the emergence of celebrity chefs, in the beginning two unique American innovations, now widely imitiated. Go back and read Joseph Wechsberg's essay on La Pyramide in Blue Trout and Black Truffles and you'll be reminded how cutting edge the American restaurant concept pioneered by Restaurant Associates once was, and how different the celebrity chef is from his predecessors, like the overinflated Paul Bocuse. Kuh's chapter on Wolfgang Puck is solidly in the tradition of the great Wechsberg, and this portrait and others make this a delightful and fascinating exploration of an exciting time. Kuh deftly draws contrasts between his own overseas and American immigrant experiences and those of Restaurant Associates' partners (who would have thought that the concept for the Four Seasons dining room in New York, the opening of which brought Julia Child to tears, was worked at a New Jersey airport restaurant owned by Restaurant Associates?), themselves products of the school of hard knocks. There are many suggestive directions here for others to take up in writing about the evolution of American cuisine.

Terrific reading, terrific research

I don't know why the other reviewers would let a misplaced comma sour them on a well-written, well-researched book that's a good deal livelier than dinner in the places he describes. Check it out for yourself.