Another Memoir from the Restaurant World

I have written several times – e.g., 2/4/10, 6/29/10, and 8/31/10 – on food and restaurant literature, including memoirs. “Blood, Bones, & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef” (Random House, 2011) is Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir about her life and her work as the owner/chef of Prune, a well-regarded New York City restaurant. But long before she gets to the part about Prune, she writes of her life in food, beginning with the feasts her parents would put on for dozens of people, and proceeding to her first restaurant job at the age of thirteen, her travels, and her years of work in restaurants and in the catering business. She also writes of her life and relationships, although these portrayals are odd in some ways: she rarely sees or writes about her parents after they divorced when she was a teenager, she only stayed close to one of her four siblings, and she writes almost too candidly about the serious problems in her relationship with her husband. (She doesn’t mention being divorced from him, but at the end of the book she intimates that divorce may be approaching.) She writes of her life as a mother of two young children and the owner of a hugely time-consuming restaurant, and of the difficult issue for women chefs of whether they can commit to this grueling business and still have personal lives, including children. One has to admire Hamilton’s toughness and can-do attitude, and her belief that just working harder and being willing to do without sleep are what it takes to succeed as a working mother; still, I wish she had acknowledged that the problems should not just be for each individual woman to solve, but are partly societal, and that there is a systemic lack of support for working women and families. Hamilton is a good writer who has an MFA degree from the University of Michigan; she has always written, and derived comfort and satisfaction from writing. The book could have been edited a bit more carefully, however; for example, the author overuses – almost like a tic – the phrase “kind of,” enough to make the reader (this reader, anyway) repeatedly cringe. Overall, though, this is an interesting and readable memoir about a strong, motivated woman who learned early on that her passion was food, and feeding people well.