Heat An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

Buford develops a superbly detailed picture of life in a top restaurant kitchen. . . Heat is a sumptuous meal. The New York Times

A delicious history of Italian cooking, with a twist: Buford, an amateur cook, entered the kitchen of one of New York City s hottest restaurants as a full-time employee, and [gives] us a story of Italian cuisine through the many characters . . . who prepare it, serve it, and eat it. GQ

Delightful. . . . Charming. . . . [Buford s] style is . . . happily obsessed with a weird subculture, woozily in love with both cooking and the foul-mouthed, refined-palette world of the chef. The Washington Post Book World
 
Exuberant, hilarious, glorying in its rich and arcane subject matter, Heat is Plimptonesque immersion journalism. . . . With Heat, we have a writer lighting on the subject of a lifetime. The Los Angeles Times Book Review