The Book of Eating: Adventures in Professional Gluttony
Written by Adam Platt
Narrated by Adam Platt
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
A wildly hilarious and irreverent memoir of a globe-trotting life lived meal-to-meal by one of our most influential and respected food critics.
As the son of a diplomat growing up in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, Adam Platt didn’t have the chance to become a picky eater. Living, traveling, and eating in some of the most far-flung locations around the world, he developed an eclectic palate and a nuanced understanding of cultures and cuisines that led to some revelations which would prove important in his future career as a food critic. In Tokyo, for instance—“a kind of paradise for nose-to-tail cooking”—he learned that “if you’re interested in telling a story, a hair-raisingly bad meal is much better than a good one."
From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, re-tracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Providing a glimpse into a life that has intertwined food and travel in exciting and unexpected ways, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age of a voracious eater and his eventual ascension to become, as he puts it, “a professional glutton.”
Adam Platt
Adam Platt has been a contributing editor and restaurant critic for New York magazine since 2000. He won the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for Restaurant Reviews in 2010. During the course of nearly twenty-five years in the magazine business, Platt has written for a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Esquire, and Condé Nast Traveler. He lives in Greenwich Village with his wife and two pizza-loving daughters.
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Reviews for The Book of Eating
10 ratings1 review
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I really bought this based on the title. Adam Platt, with whom I was not familiar, is/was restaurant critic for New York (not The New Yorker) magazine. This is something of a food-focused memoir. We learn a little about his strange parents and stranger upbringing in Asian countries, then a little about his career in journalism and becoming a NYC restaurant critic. It's somewhat repetitive. He uses the word "dyspeptic" to describe himself way too many times. There aren't too many really stand-out moments. A chapter where he decides to bring five 4-year-olds to the fanciest restaurant in town is unusually lively and engaging, but it's an exception.