Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking

Product Description “You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.” —The Wall Street JournalWhat does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon’s best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen. With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture. Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of May 2020: It seems like a crazy idea to pick up stakes from a comfortable life in New York and move your wife and three-year-old twins to a city in France (not Paris) to look for a job in a restaurant. It might make more sense if you are Bill Buford, author of Heat, the 2006 book that did for Italian food what, frankly, Dirt will do for French cuisine. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Bill Buford is a foodie with literary chops—he founded the literary magazine Granta and was fiction editor of the New Yorker--but he is also an adventurer, and apparently a very hard worker. After locating a home abroad (Buford’s wife is essential in many of his endeavors), enrolling his kids in a local school, learning French, studying technique at L’Institute Bocuse, and enduring fifteen hour days at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Lyon, the heart of French cuisine, he still managed to write down his experiences with humor and vibrancy. Dirt is the result of five years living and working in France, learning to know the people and their food, and getting to the heart of something—some feeling or quality of living—for which many of us are searching. —Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review Review “A profound and intuitive work of immersive journalism.” —The New York Times“You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France. . . .Buford brings a novelistic approach to his story; he is both observerand participant. He’s an entertaining, often comical, raconteur.” —The Wall Street Journal“Blazingly entertaining and frequently scalding.” —NPR“A delightful, highly idiosyncratic exploration. . . . [Dirt] may well bean even greater pleasure than its predecessor.” —The New York Times Book Review"Pure pleasure. Masterfully written. If you care at all about food, about writing, about obsessive people with a sense of adventure, you have to read this book. It is, in a word, wonderful.” —Ruth Reichl“[Buford] is knowledgeable, quick, and funny—and Dirt is a work of cultural, historical, and gastronomical depth that reads like an action memoir. . . . He truly took me to the heart of French cuisine.” —Eleanor Beardsley, NPR“A satisfying and envy-inspiring travelogue.” —Joumana Khatib, The New York Times"Bill’s ability to fully immerse himself in a foreign place, seemingly at the drop of a dime, is always a sight to behold. With Dirt, Bill dives deep into the unforgiving kitchen culture of Lyon and expresses what it’s truly like to be a cook in this legendary food city.” —Marcus Samuelsson“[Buford’s] writing is filled with humor and heart. . . . [He] underlines a deeply resonant tenet of life: the value of community.” —Time“Required reading for anyone with a love of history, good eating, and masterful storytelling.” —David Chang“Buford has created a unique brand of immersive food writing that channels some of the greatest ever