Kevin Alexander

The subtitle to Burn The Ice is "The American Culinary Revolution and its End" and nowere is this better argued than in the Introduction. Alexander is a food writer for magazines such Esquire and his ability to write strong, insightful analysis is quite apparent with this Introduction which reads like a magazine article. His argument is that the creative period of the Culinary Revolution has passed and now we are in a period of creative stagnation that will likely only be cured by another period of experimentation with new ideas.

The rest of the book consists of small biographies of restaurateurs or people in the hospitality business in four increments: 2006, 2009, 2013 and 2017. The restaurants profiled in these sections seem to be mostly based in San Francisco and New York City and if I am lucky I might get to eat at one of these restaurants in my lifetime. However, I found it interesting to simply read about them and gain perspective on the issues and struggles from the industry side. Some of these restaurateurs have multiple parts to their story and its interesting to see how they struggled with various steps along the way and how the reinvented themselves when needed. My one critique of this style of narrative is that the start of each additional segment made me wince while I anticipated bad news to develop for a particular restaurant or their story to take a turn for the worse. Besides that, I found some really interesting biographies of people I might have never heard of otherwise.… (meer)

This book had a five-star introduction, which can stand on its own, about how we have to by now have reached Peak Foodieness - there are too many restaurants, too many products, too many trends moving too fast, all chasing too few dollars. He hopes his book will be a kind of "You heard it here first!"

But then, the body of the book is entirely different. He attempts to tell the story of this rise of the unsustainable fetishization of food, by means of the stories of various individuals - chefs, restauranteurs, bartenders. The individual stories don't always go from start to finish, but are broken up in spots that feel random and scattered around. And they attempt to convey a mood of fever pitch by means of relentless lists and name-dropping, name-dropping, name-dropping. I found myself helplessly carried along in the hopes of reaching some satisfying climax and denouement, all the while saying, "I don't care. I don't care. I don't CARE about these people I've never heard of and the exact locations of their establishments, in cities I've barely been to! I don't even LIKE cocktails!"

The two chapters I liked best were like the introduction in that they could easily stand on their own as essays - maybe Alexander should in fact stick to writing essays. They were the bits about Guy Fieri, which was written entirely in the form of questions; and the Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond. It helped that I actually know who these people are.

Ultimately there was no climax, I guess because the crash hasn't happened yet. Why didn't he at least have a final chapter conjecturing how it all might end? I really couldn't help but feel ripped off.… (meer)