About Books: The Ruhlman Trilogy

I'm a sucker for food writing. I read the blogs, I read the online reviewers, I subscribe to more than one culinary magazine. And amazon.com emails me every time a new book about food, cooking, or restaurants is published. (Sometimes I think I single-handedly keep them in business.)

So it should be no surprise that I recently read my way through Michael Ruhlman's "chef trilogy" -- The Making of a Chef, The Soul of a Chef, and The Reach of a Chef. Ruhlman is a journalist and self-professed "hobby cook" who peeked inside the world of professional cooking in America and invited us along for the ride.

In The Making of a Chef, Ruhlman takes his reader to the Culinary Institute of America, and gives her a taste of what it might be like to be a student there. (Maybe not "might be like" -- my CIA-trained friend tells me Ruhlman's account is spot on.) And that taste is at the same time exhilirating, exciting, and scary. Could I hack it? Unclear. Do I want to find out? The book leaves me unclear on that too, at moments sending me to download the application and hone my knife skills, at others leaving me feeling old and tired and lacking the ability to do much more than my desk job.

The reader's next journey, in The Soul of a Chef, is behind the scenes at the Certified Master Chef exam (seven chefs begin, how many will pass?), and in the kitchens of two top American chefs, Michael Symon (of, most famously, Lola, in Cleveland, OH) and Thomas Keller (of, among other places, French Laundry, in Yountville, CA). The best passages? Those telling us Keller's story, his passion for food and restaurants that leaps off the pages and makes the reader want to sign up to be a part of whatever Keller does next. (Of local interest, we also get a glimpse into Eric Ziebold's time as a sous chef at French Laundry. He's now chef de cuisine at CityZen here in Washington, a restaurant high on my list of places to try.)

Two books completed, I could hardly wait to pick up The Reach of a Chef. But unfortunately, Ruhlman's luster seemed to be wearing off. I noticed repeated stories. "Yeah, yeah," I found myself thinking. "I remember this one. Move on. Tell me something new." Perhaps it's an unfair criticism, as new readers will enjoy the background stories, and the books are not necessarily designed to build one off of the other like the Harry Potter books or the Star Wars movies. But doesn't it seem logical that much of the audience for Ruhlman's third "chef" book would overlap with the audience for the first two? There must be more graceful ways to bring newbies up to speed without alienating faithful readers of the two earlier books. The final book in the trilogy was worth reading -- I came away with new thoughts on the role of a chef, as artist, scientist, and businessperson -- but it didn't transport me into another world as the first two did.

I couldn't help but compare these books to a book about another passion (fantasy baseball) written by another journalist (Wall Street Journal writer Sam Walker) I read around the same time -- Fantasyland. Suprisingly (because food and cooking are my passions, and going to culinary school my daydream... and fantasy baseball, well, not so much), Fantasyland came out on top. It was compelling and well-written, and I couldn't put it down. (And I don't care about baseball. Really. Not at all. Talk to me again in basketball season.) It's the sign of a truly gifted writer when a reader who couldn't care less about the subject of a book cannot put it down -- and I'm not entirely sure Ruhlman's "chef" trilogy would pass that test.