The Season 18 Top Chef premiere is only a couple days away. So it is fitting that I found myself reading a couple of books that are Top Chef adjacent.
The first, Apron Anxiety, is a chronicle of Alyssa Shelasky’s “messy affairs in and out of the kitchen.” Shelasky, a New York City-based gossip and celebrity journalist changes her life and her outlook of it when she discovers a dormant passion for cooking. Apron Anxiety spends time before, during and after her relationship with Top Chef contestant Spike Mendelsohn. Note that Mendelsohn was named only as “Chef” in the book and I used all my willpower to wait until the end to utilize the Google machine to uncover his identity. While the relationship had ups and downs, through it she found cooking and, perhaps more importantly, purpose. While reading about Shelasky’s exploits is fun, the relationship she develops with herself and those around her through food and cooking are much more meaningful.
After devouring Apron Anxiety, I jumped into Padma Lakshmi’s memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate. I knew very little about Lakshmi before reading the book: former model, TV host, spent a stint married to Salman Rushdie. Lakshmi is, not surprisingly, a much more complex individual than those three points allow. Hers has been a life spent around the world, discovering and searching. Lakshmi’s writing style is easy and clean. At times, the book feels heavy, Lakshmi having experienced more than her share of heartache, a celebrity romp this is not. As a Top Chef junkie, I longed for more behind the scenes detail but there’s really very little insight into the show itself, for that is not the objective of the book. Although, the snippets do make very clear that hosting Top Chef is much harder than it looks. Love, Loss, and What We Ate is the the honest retelling of how the experiences of her life have shaped her into the person she is today.
Recipes are sprinkled throughout each book, giving us the opportunity to share some of their experiences. Apron Anxiety was published nearly ten years ago and Love, Loss, and What We Ate is now nearly five years old, leaving the reader with the distinct knowledge that there is more to the story. What happened next?
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