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Title: Chef Daniel Boulud: Cooking In New York City by Daniel Boulud, Peter Kaminsky, Martin H. M. Schreiber, Herve Amiard ISBN: 2-84323-370-4 Publisher: Assouline Pub. Date: October, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (4 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Don't waste your money
Comment: I expected a lot form this book, as Mr. Boulud's previous book was very good. But this one is not so much a book of recipes or cooking techniques as it is a lot of pictures of wine bottles, Mr.Boulud's daily life and so on. Also, a lot of pages made up of huge fonts which say too little but look too much. Recipes are not good at all, if you can find any. For example between pages 240 and 260 there is no single recipe but a lot of photographs of everything except recipes. I personally wouldn't give a try to any one of his recipes. The price for this book should be no more than $5. Hence, please don't waste your money.
Rating: 2
Summary: Too Expensive, for too small a portion
Comment: This book may look like a work of culinary photojournalism, being a chronicle of a day in the life of Chef Boulud at his three Manhattan restaurants. While the book has some of the ingredients which would comprise such a work, it is actually a book of recipes from his three restaurants hung on a rather thin framework of the day in the life of a major restaurant kitchen.
The framework text can be read in less than an hour and contains several errors in punctuation and word usage which a copy editor should have corrected. The design of the text presentation is equally poor. There are shifts in font to signify changes in topic or voice. Some pages of text look like something out of Alice in Wonderland or Monty Python with staggered letters and words and poor choices of text / background color contrasts. Very difficult to read, what little of it there is.
As in some other recipe books I've seen, a minority of the photographs display the food and it's preparation while the majority of the photographs show restaurant workers and celebrity friends of Chef Daniel hamming it up for the camera.
This leaves the recipes. In 234 pages, there are a scant 80 recipes, all of which are presented as being from one of Boulud's restaurants, and, most are indeed recipes one would not likely make at home. There is a high incidence of unusual and expensive ingredients such as pig's head, and some downright bizarre, such as piballes worms. Many of the recipes are also very long in the preparation. Unlike every other cookbook I have reviewed up until now, I did not bother to actually make any of the recipes therein, as it was apparent that except for a few, mostly breads and desserts, these were not the kind of dishes the average person would make, even for entertaining. (This is not typical of restaurant cookbooks, as I find no difficulty making many of the recipes in Mario Batali's Babbo cookbook.) A good case in point is the db hamburger made with truffles, foie gras, and comfit, oh my.
Most recipes include a wine recommendation giving a specific vineyard and year, about which I can have no opinion except that it does nothing to enhance the value of the book for me. A type of wine such as 'chardonnay' or 'merlot' would have been quite good enough. I will give a small nod to their wine recommendation of 'beer' for some of the dishes.
The book includes a list of sources, a requirement for these recipes with many unusual ingredients.
In all, I think the only value to purchasing this book is if one wishes to dine at one or more of Daniel Boulud's restaurants often and wish to know what goes into his stuff or, if one wishes to create a restaurant menu very similar to Boulud's fare. One may find some value to looking through this book at a library if one wants to research variations on a particular recipe.
In sum, recipes may be good, but there are too few and the presentation is poor. Other restaurant / celebrity chef books do much better.
Rating: 4
Summary: four stars
Comment: What a delight to peek behind the swinging door at one of the top restaurants in the world. The people who make Daniel run day to day - that's what intrigued me about this book. These men and women take feeding people very seriously. The philosophy of Daniel Boulud radiates in everything that is done at Daniel - soigne. They take care of people and don't miss a beat from the flowers to the wine, the great service, and of course the food. Brenner introduces the reader to all of the people who make it work from the farmers to the seafood purveyors, cheese shops, wine reps, cooks, maitre d's, pastry chefs, pr people, owners, and of course the guests (don't forget the VIPs). Brenner does a fabulous job of putting the reader behind the scenes.
Being a novice food person, many many of the terms I didn't know. It might be helpful to have a glossary or even a floorplan of the restaurant (maybe the hardcover edition has this). Also, when writing dialog, Brenner often has one person asking a question of someone else but it never gets answered. Or there might be an answer but it's to a different question in a different conversation altogether. I'm sure the confusion of the reader parallels the confusion of a worker in a restaurant kitchen. Regardless, it was at times very hard to follow. I would have liked to have read more about the servers, who are called captains at Daniel. The sommelier, reservationists, bartender, maitre d', cheese person and many others all had a lot of coverage, but the servers, who really present the face of the restaurant to the client, were not covered in detail.
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Title: The Fourth Star : Dispatches from Inside Daniel Boulud's Celebrated New York Restaurant by Leslie Brenner ISBN: 0609608088 Publisher: Clarkson Potter Pub. Date: 11 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Amuse-Bouche: Little Bites That Delight Before the Meal Begins by Rick Tramonto, Mary Goodbody ISBN: 0375507604 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 22 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Daniel Boulud's Cafe Boulud Cookbook: French-American Recipes for the Home Cook by Daniel Boulud, Dorie Greenspan, Martha Stewart ISBN: 068486343X Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: November, 1999 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: A Return to Cooking by Eric Ripert, Michael Ruhlman, Level ISBN: 1579651879 Publisher: Artisan Sales Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
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Title: Girardet: Recipes from a Master of French Cuisine by Fredy Giradet, Pierre-Michel Delessert, Fredy Girardet, Joel Robuchan ISBN: 1580084117 Publisher: Ten Speed Press Pub. Date: September, 2002 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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