Introduction

With the wit and pace of Anthony Bourdain, Italian chef and anthropologist Leonardo Lucarelli sketches the exhilarating life behind the closed doors of restaurants, and the unlikely work ethics of the kitchen.
 
In Italy, five-star restaurants and celebrity chefs may seem, on the surface, a part of the landscape. In reality, the restaurant industry is as tough, cutthroat, and unforgiving as anywhere else in the world--sometimes even colluding with the shady world of organized crime. The powerful voice of Leonardo Lucarelli takes us through the underbelly of Italy's restaurant world. Lucarelli is a professional chef who for almost two decades has been roaming Italy opening restaurants, training underpaid, sometimes hopelessly incompetent sous-chefs, courting waitresses, working long hours, riding high on drugs, and cursing a culinary passion he inherited as a teenager from his hippie father. In his debut, Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, Lucarelli teaches us that even among rogues and misfits, there is a moral code in the kitchen that must, above all else, always be upheld.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of December 2016: Mincemeat brings a breath of fresh Roman air to the chef memoir. Author Leonardo Lucarelli has spent nearly two decades in high end kitchens, small village restaurants, and everything in between, learning about food and life. Lucarelli cooked at some of Rome’s raucous hotspots and has his share of drug-fueled stories to tell, but this isn’t an account of life in the culinary fast lane. Rather, it’s about the journey of one Italian chef, and the highs and lows that define a restaurant kitchen. Over the years Lucarelli found that although he’s a skilled chef, that moniker isn’t all that defines him. He doesn’t extoll the virtues of feeding people, of cooking as a passion/addiction—instead he talks about continuing to cook because he’s good at it, he enjoys it, and being a restaurant chef offers good pay, freedom, and excitement. We’re so inundated with stories of the culinary inventors, the T.V. personalities, and the tantrum throwers, that sometimes we may forget the chefs who are behind the scenes of our everyday lives. Mincemeat is an antidote to that, showing us the personalities and unspoken code behind the swinging doors, be it Italy or Iowa. --Seira Wilson, The Amazon Book Review

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