Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater
By Alan Richman
Harper Perennial 2005
By Dustin Nelson
In Fork It Over, author Alan Richman blatantly states in the first chapter that “Food is life. The rest is parsley.” This remark is soon understood as the twelve-time winner of the James Beard Foundation Award elaborates about what all is involved in being a professional food critic.
The book is a collection of over two bakers’ dozens worth of anecdotes that were written primarily for Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine, with a few from Food and Wine. After reading just one of his journeys, it becomes clear why these stories are labeled as the intrepid adventures of a professional eater.
His journeys range from hole-in-the wall dives in Los Angeles that serve some of the best burgers he has tasted, to the fancy upscale restaurants in the Hamptons of New York that have served him some of the more bland food he has tasted. With his detail-oriented style of writing you may wish you were or weren’t there, depending on what he tells is served.
Richman uses clever analogies to really express how he felt while eating different meals. It’s not too often one hears about the taste of lamb chops being on the same level as the Parthenon was to the Greeks. Even better is his analogy of barbeque. “Barbeque without wood is like French food without butter, inappropriate and insulting.” Richman has a strong opinion of food and he reveals it throughout his many dining experiences around the globe.
However, he does not just critique the food. Richman does such a great job of describing, in detail, the environment that you may feel like you are dining right there with him. For instance, he was in Vietnam during the war. He describes the wet, humid climate of that peninsula with such detail you would start to sweat and want to grab a Coca-Cola classic to cool down like he did. He does not just elaborate on the environment and the atmosphere. He is so sound in his descriptions he’ll describe the subtle facial expressions on people. Someone once looked at him as if he “translated the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Chapters are not directly linked to each other. This particular book is unlike several books as the chapters are not related and do not build upon each other. The only thing that binds these anecdotes together is the subject of food.
For instance, one chapter talks about his eats at Monte Carlo and the next is about his dinner with Sharon Stone. The beauty of this is that one may start anywhere in the book and not be lost. Each story is around twenty pages so in that regard it makes for an easy read. However, you may want to have a food dictionary and Webster’s dictionary handy as his vernacular is sometimes ambiguous (especially when he talks of his week long trip to France).
This is not a bad thing, though.
