Hello friends,
So last time I did a book review I discussed Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. It shed some light on the dark, grueling, yet potentially rewarding reality that is the restaurant business. It also brings me to a wonderful place to discuss this post’s review of Alyssa Shelasky’s Apron Anxiety.
I’ll start with just my plain old honest opinion:
It’s amusing, but if you are looking for depth and a serious food memoir book, perhaps you should turn to something else.
It follows Alyssa’s life and her experiences with food, though many of the earlier parts are much more about her and her, let’s call it eccentric, personality. It actually took a while for me to get into this book, due to the overwhelming feeling that Shelasky was trying way too hard to sound “different” from others her age.
She was “writing screenplays at third grade” and her thoughts ranged from “so dark… [she] should have been committed” to “so frivolous that [she] could have been on The Hills”. I don’t know about you but I was a teenager once and that sounds like many girls I knew.She was also happy to take her shirt off as soon as she got a pair of DD’s in high school and had one of her friends as an “agent” because “[she] could only strip if she [was] supervised and approved.”Okay, here I give it to you: I only knew a few girls like this in high school. It doesn’t quite fit with the screenwriter, deep thoughts image we get a few pages earlier, but teenagers are weird right?
So yeah. There’s a lot of this throughout the whole book. It’s a tad Sex and the City-esque, with a larger emphasis on food once she meets Chef.
Now who is Chef you may wonder? Well I did some Googling and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Spike Mendelsohn from Top Chef Season 4.
Perhaps I should not have looked him up because, once I knew it was him, I always sided with his character in the multitude of arguments he and Alyssa had. Their relationship was a turbulent one, and I will not go into detail so as to save the plot surprises for you if you choose to read it.
The other reason I tended to side with Chef is due to having read Bourdain’s book prior to Apron Anxiety. The restaurant business is tough. It is not like Top Chef or how it is portrayed on television. So I was kind of shocked at the lack of understanding from Shelasky’s character when it came to Chef’s career. True, he wasn’t always 100% the best boyfriend ever, but one should expect all this when getting into a relationship with a chef. Perhaps she should have read Bourdain before dating Chef.
*Just a side note here, not a huge Sex and the City Fan but I really kept feeling like Chef was Alyssa’s way of having a Big in the story.
To make a long story short, this is not a memoir about food so much as a memoir about Alyssa Shelasky. There is nothing wrong with that, but I guess I could’ve just used a little less “it’s-all-about-me-all-the-time” and more revelations about food. Others like me posted some interesting reviews on GoodReads:
There are some great recipes and cooking does pull her out of a dark time in her life, but one must get through the overwhelming amount of, dare I say bullshit, to get to those parts.
Out of 10, I give it a 5 on my “Books Worth Reading” scale. If there is a word to go with that number, it’s “meh”.
Regardless, this does bring us to a great topic to discuss on Feast with Me: the celebritization of chefs. Yes, I just made that word up. Don’t worry about it English professors do it all the time.
Have you read Apron Anxiety? Share your opinions in the comments section! I’d love to hear what you thought of it.
Until we eat again,
~Jess
