Bread and Butter [Kindle Edition] Author: Michelle Wildgen | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EMXBD4I | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Free download Download Bread and Butter [Kindle Edition] for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link Kitchen Confidential meets Three Junes in this mouthwatering novel about three brothers who run competing restaurants, and the culinary snobbery, staff stealing, and secret affairs that unfold in the back of the house.
Britt and Leo have spent ten years running Winesap, the best restaurant in their small Pennsylvania town. They cater to their loyal customers; they don't sleep with the staff; and business is good, even if their temperamental pastry chef is bored with making the same chocolate cake night after night. But when their younger brother, Harry, opens his own restaurant—a hip little joint serving an aggressive lamb neck dish—Britt and Leo find their own restaurant thrown off-kilter. Britt becomes fascinated by a customer who arrives night after night, each time with a different dinner companion. Their pastry chef, Hector, quits, only to reappear at Harry's restaurant. And Leo finds himself falling for his executive chef-tempted to break the cardinal rule of restaurant ownership. Filled with hilarious insider detail—the one-upmanship of staff meals before the shift begins, the rivalry between bartender and hostess, the seedy bar where waitstaff and chefs go to drink off their workday—Bread and Butter is both an incisive novel of family and a gleeful romp through the inner workings of restaurant kitchens. Direct download links available for Download Bread and Butter
- File Size: 1877 KB
- Print Length: 337 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0385537433
- Publisher: Doubleday (February 11, 2014)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EMXBD4I
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,403 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Humor & Satire > Literary Humor
- #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Humor & Satire > Literary Humor
Bread and Butter is sheer delight to read from beginning to end. It makes you forget about the 12 inches of snow outside, as you follow a truly delightful cast of characters as they navigate the ins and outs of the restaurant business, family dynamics and love.
Leo and his brother Britt have worked together for years and their restaurant Winesap located approximately 1 ? hours out of Philadelphia is running smoothly. Stoic Leo runs the back and Britt, with his flawless eye for detail and swagger, the front of the restaurant. When their younger brother Harry moves back home and decides to open his own restaurant, a few blocks away in the seedier part of town, he looks to his older brothers for help and guidance. Harry's restaurant will come to mean different things to the three brothers. For Harry, the culmination of years of starts and stops in many other endeavors. For Leo, an eye-opener to the fact that maybe he has become complacent and needs to jump start both Winesap's menu and his own life. For Britt, a chance to prove he is not "just the face of the restaurant" but can also be the brains. Family being family, it does not take long for cracks in their relationships to emerge and what moves the story engagingly along is the why and how they crumble. The author is able to bring the sibling rivalry, jealousy, and resentments that turn little molehills into giant mountains to life. That being said, these character do grow and change.
Bread and Butter perfectly captures the atmosphere and minutiae of restaurant life. The reader is also privy to scrumptious insider details of what really goes on in your favorite restaurant. While you need not be a connoisseur, the food descriptions were mouth watering.
One of my favorite web-celebrities maintains that bad is the absence of good, but I disagree. However, I can see where he's coming from. I have read much worse books than "Bread and Butter," books I hated, books that infuriated me, books that made me want to throw them across the room. But in even the worst books, I usually find something of interest-- a memorable scene or character, or even just prose that's so bad it's good.
But "Bread and Butter" elicited little response from me at all. There just wasn't much to pull me in or spark my imagination. I think the main problem here is that, instead of being a book about characters who work in the restaurant industry, it's a fictionalized account of working in the restaurant industry with characters who are little more than props. They're just so typical and undetailed-- Britt is the one with an eye for style and a gift for faking intimacy with customers, Leo is the introverted one who runs things but keeps to himself, Harry is the young, creative one with a sort of bohemian lifestyle. Plots with boring characters can work, but the plot here doesn't really get started until about 100 pages in. The set-up takes way too long and just isn't interesting at all. The characters sit around and talk about interior design, menus, whether their restaurants are too conservative or too bold; we hear them mull over their conflicts with each other, over and over. There is some stuff on the politics of the restaurants, but most of it isn't particularly funny. Nothing really happens with the romantic interests, either (neither of which are very interesting).
I will say that Wildgen writes about food very well. Reading this book made me hungry (for food I can't afford, but that's beside the point). She also gets the industry right.
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