Mincemeat

The Education of an Italian Chef

By: Leonardo Lucarelli, Lorena Rossi Gori - translator, Danielle Rossi - translator

Narrated by: Will Damron

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

Never Goes Anywhere

I listen to a lot of culinary books and I really gave this one a chance. Sadly, the characters aren't that engaging and the main character, Leo, is just not someone you really end up caring about at all. Storyline is scattered and often you'll have character threads start, but then just stop and the plot moves elsewhere. Leo is a pretty vapid, selfish character which makes it tough to care about any predicaments he ends up in. Narration is pretty good, but when the story itself is meh then the person reading it really can't save it. I got about 4 hours into it and eventually called it quits.