Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef

Leonardo Lucarelli

Dec 2016 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Will Damron

About this audiobook

With the wit and pace of Anthony Bourdain, Italian chef and anthropologist Leonardo Lucarelli sketches the exhilarating life behind the closed doors of restaurants, and the unlikely work ethics of the kitchen.
 
In Italy, five-star restaurants and celebrity chefs may seem, on the surface, a part of the landscape. In reality, the restaurant industry is as tough, cutthroat, and unforgiving as anywhere else in the world--sometimes even colluding with the shady world of organized crime. The powerful voice of Leonardo Lucarelli takes us through the underbelly of Italy's restaurant world. Lucarelli is a professional chef who for almost two decades has been roaming Italy opening restaurants, training underpaid, sometimes hopelessly incompetent sous-chefs, courting waitresses, working long hours, riding high on drugs, and cursing a culinary passion he inherited as a teenager from his hippie father. In his debut, Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, Lucarelli teaches us that even among rogues and misfits, there is a moral code in the kitchen that must, above all

About the author

Leonardo Lucarelli was born in India and has since resided in regions all across Italy, including Rome, Lazio, Emilia Romagna, Veneta, Trentino, and Tuscany. He entered the culinary world while a college student, and after completing a degree in anthropology, he became a chef. He has worked in the kitchens of fifteen restaurants—some Michelin-starred, and seven of which he served as chef. Lucarelli currently lives in L’Aquila, where he consults for several restaurants in Rome.
 
Lorena Rossi Gori, who was born in Scotland and raised in Australia, came to Italy on a family holiday and never left. An avid traveler and opera fan, she works as a conference interpreter and translator.
 
Danielle Rossi was born in Melbourne, Australia, and lived and studied in Hobart, Florence, Lucca, and Milan before eventually resettling in Melbourne, where she teaches Italian and translating at Monash University. Danielle and Lorena come from a long line of hoteliers and restaurateurs and know a thing or two about demented knife-hurling chefs.