The Table Comes First

September 12, 2011
By turns ponderous and amiable, recherché and playful, Gopnik’s (The Steps Across the Water) look at the changing rituals of eating and cookery is thorough and rarely dull. Drawing heavily from his stints living in France, and having become the professed “cooking husband” in his family, Gopnik has grown intensely interested in “questions of food” and how the way we eat reflects the changing state of our civilization. He explores the rise of restaurants in Paris before the Revolution as rest stops offering restorative bouillon and places where women could even appear alone. Along with the growth of restaurants in the Palais Royal emerged food writers like Brillat-Savarin (Physiology of Taste), and cookbook manuals such as Gopnik’s favorite, the recondite Diary of a Greedy Woman by the late–19th-century English writer Elizabeth Pennell—all the while sharing his own cooking “secrets.” Distinctions between “mouth taste” and “moral taste” have grown increasingly urgent, since the slow food movement embraces localism, sustainability, and “peasant food,” and Gopnik sermonizes rather tautologically on how fashions can change when people change their values. He takes up the debate between meat eating versus vegetarianism, concocts a meal in New York City using only local products (even a Bronx-bred chicken), faces down the wine connoisseurs, and visits plenty of chefs on both sides of the Atlantic for ideal dishes.

January 2, 2012
Longtime New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik charts the rise and evolution of America’s obsessive foodie culture, tracing the roots of “eclectic eating in big cities” back to French manners, describing how the emergence of restaurants affected social norms, and chronicling his own culinary adventures and misadventures in both the United States and Europe. Gopnik is an enthusiastic reader, especially when describing his own experiences, e.g., the wariness in his voice is palpable as he embarks on a possibly illicit mission to procure (and consume) a New York–raised chicken. However, Gopnik’s narration is less natural during more academic sections of the book, such as when he attempts to place our relationship with eating in a historical context. In such cases, his reading sounds stilted—as if he’s delivering a lecture from his notes. A Knopf hardcover.

September 1, 2011

A philosophical look at French food and how it has affected our eating habits and our lives.

New Yorker writer Gopnik's latest book (Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, 2009, etc.) is not for the fast-food junkie in search of a quick fix; the essays are delicious in small bites though slightly overwhelming in large quantities. Throughout, the author displays a masterful grasp of French cuisine and history. Starting with the origins of the restaurant in France as a byproduct of the French Revolution and meals served in inns as another form of seduction in the quest for sex, Gopnik moves on to reflect on the recipe, the meaning of taste and the ongoing argument for and against eating meat. Whether he is discussing haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine or the newest techno-emotional cuisine, the author ponders the real meaning of food, beyond the need to satisfy a hunger—is it to provide comfort, is it a symbol of love or something more sacred? Local foods, French wines and a discussion of peasant foods versus traditional French cooking all blend together into a rich feast of sensory details. These essays will leave no doubt in readers' minds that Gopnik is a true food aficionado with a desire to share his musings. To lighten the heaviness of his chapters, the author intersperses delightful, almost comic letters written to Elizabeth Pennell, a food critic and writer in the 19th century. Here he adopts a more informal tone and provides insights into his family life and the recipes he prepares for his children.

Rich in context and philosophical thoughts, Gopnik's book will satiate the most ardent of food-history buffs.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2011

As a writer for The New Yorker for 25 years, Gopnik has been commenting on popular and eccentric American fads and sociocultural issues such as the NFL play-offs, the Internet, and our fascination with food and food preparation. Here, he satirizes the pleasures of the dining table--the routines of being beckoned by the family recipe or the restaurant menu, selecting what dishes to eat, socializing with fellow diners, and, finally, leaving with memories of the gathering. Within this framework, Gopnik comments on how we think about our daily practices of cooking and eating as an expression of the way we live and our changing values. He banters extensively on our obsessive interest in food, specifically in preserving traditional and regional cuisine, including the growth of local foodstuffs, and in applying technology to food preparation and presentation (e.g., molecular gastronomy). VERDICT Despite Gopnik's allusive, witty prose, his supercilious and moralistic discussion will leave readers with a bad taste in the mouth. Down-to-earth foodies might prefer Jason Epstein's Eating. [Eight-city tour.]--Jerry P. Miller, Cambridge, MA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2011
In a series of essays, Gopnik surveys the food world, why we eat what we eat, who we eat it with, and where we enjoy it, whether at home or abroad. Gopnik explores the evolution of restaurants from their French origins. He visits with London's Fergus Henderson, high priest of carnivorism, which then leads Gopnik to reflect at length on the persistent meat-versus-vegetable debate. Assembling a meal with ingredients from New York City proves that eating locally is in some degree possible even in a metropolis. Having resided in Paris, Gopnik has credentials to survey the present state of French cooking and its future possibilities. He also analyzes the lure of wines and the controversial role Robert Parker has played in that industry. Interspersed with the essays, Gopnik imagines a series of e-mails, a one-way correspondence with the Late Victorian Elizabeth Pennell, an early food critic and cookbook collector. Consummately literate, Gopnik's essays delight and provoke at every turn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)