A review by squid_vicious
Get Jiro! by Joel Rose, Anthony Bourdain

5.0

In a near-future, vaguely dystopian Los Angeles, food culture is everything: chefs are the new rock stars, getting a reservation at a hip restaurant is like winning the lottery. Two cooking "families" have replaced the mob: the more traditional haute-cuisine guys vs. the slow food flexitarians... Somewhere on the outside of this scene is Jiro, a sushi chef with a tiny restaurant but a huge reputation. Jiro takes his work extremely seriously, and if you are dumb enough to mishandle your chopsticks or drop rice into the soy sauce, he won't take it very kindly. He inadvertently brings the attention of the two food factions on himself when he dispatches a crass customer who turns out to have been an important supplier, and both the traditionalists and the hippies will go to great lengths to try get him to join their side of the culinary war.

For an insatiable Bourdain fangirl like myself, this was just pure fun: I'm sure chopping up customers (who got sushi etiquette wrong) or line cooks (who wanted to garnish their veal blanquette) into little pieces is something Bourdain actually fantasized about. And obviously, the all-organic-all-local-hippies are not depicted in a very flattering light (their leader Rose is a painfully obvious caricature of Alice Waters)... While there is violence and bloodshed galore in those pages, the story is fun and engaging (with a not-so-subtle criticism of the food industry's most damaging practices and nod at the small independent restaurateurs struggling to stay alive in that cut-throat world), and the artwork is stunning. You can also see Bourdain's love of food and cooking shine through, in the way characters talk about their boudain noir and enjoy foie gras. But really, he is just having fun here, writing about things he loved: organized crime stories and sushi.

Cheeky as hell, I just loved it!