Matthew Royal reviewed Sous Chef by Michael Gibney
Review of 'Sous Chef' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
The secret Iron Chef ingredient everything in this book is made from is... drum roll... testosterone!
Michael Gibney and his chef bros aspire to the tatted-up kitchen bad boys on the poster in their kitchen. His knives are ladies, and plunging them into a brie is steamy sex, complete with a cigarette smoked out back when the work is finished. He unconsciously describes a kitchen hierarchy ideally run with military precision, complete with hero worship up the chain of command, battlefield promotions, discipline, honor, and pride in your unit, regimentation of jobs with only one right way to do everything, looking askance at "mercenary" workers who move on when a better kitchen opens up, and screaming for respect from underlings even when you're at fault.
Gibney mentions that old school chefs, like his chef, took their knocks in Paris at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, and now they knock …
The secret Iron Chef ingredient everything in this book is made from is... drum roll... testosterone!
Michael Gibney and his chef bros aspire to the tatted-up kitchen bad boys on the poster in their kitchen. His knives are ladies, and plunging them into a brie is steamy sex, complete with a cigarette smoked out back when the work is finished. He unconsciously describes a kitchen hierarchy ideally run with military precision, complete with hero worship up the chain of command, battlefield promotions, discipline, honor, and pride in your unit, regimentation of jobs with only one right way to do everything, looking askance at "mercenary" workers who move on when a better kitchen opens up, and screaming for respect from underlings even when you're at fault.
Gibney mentions that old school chefs, like his chef, took their knocks in Paris at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, and now they knock everyone else. Julia Child in her semi-autobiography, My Life in France, observed a huge number of recently discharged soldiers attending Cordon Bleu on the GI bill following World War II, and I suspect this modern American macho chef archetype and the entire militarized kitchen culture stems from this surge of military men into the kitchen.
Annoyingly, Gibney uses "fake" 2nd person narrative. It's not a choose-your-own adventure book, and it's not generalized to be Everyman's experience, so it comes across as juvenile. We hear every uncensored inner thought, whether or not it's kitchen-related, as though he wrote a 1st person stream of consciousness narrative, but then remembered his middle school teacher telling him NEVER to write the word "I" in a book report. Find, replace, done.
This is not a book that will help you understand the processes of a Sous chef, the techniques they use, or how to become one. It's not generalized enough to give you tips on planning a menu, breaking down a recipe into a project plan, or perfecting your mise en place. It is a day in the life of one man who works as a sous chef, so it's a primary source you'll have to synthesize, and isn't any of the things you were hoping for when you saw the book in the library and added it to your Goodreads.
