This was an odd book that felt like it was two different stories grafted together. During the first half of the book I was thinking it was going one way, but then it oddly shifted in the middle and turned out to be completely different.
So focusing on the first half, there is some great writing about food in Mumbai, and growing up in a big (rich) Indian family that runs a restaurant. The writer has done a lot of research and put in a ton of details to make things come to life.
After a brief time spent in London the family moves to a small village in France. Magically the perfect house appears, magically language troubles don’t come up, magically a perfect foil is available to provide a counterpoint to the Indian restaurant that the newly arrived family opens up. All of that I can forgive because I am reading this for entertainment and it is a small price to pay for the fantasy.
Life in the French countryside sounds great, and surprisingly there are few culture shock moments for the Indian family. There is a point when the talented son in the family (the main character in this book) discovers that he has a gift for cooking, and soon thereafter decides to sort of pitch his culture’s cooking in favor of learning to cook French classical cuisine. I couldn’t buy his motivation for changing his focus – supposedly while this Muslim teenager was watching a group of French people slaughter a pig the old fashioned way he was inspired to learn French cooking. Hmm…
Then oddly the book takes a sharp turn and we follow the budding French cook to Paris and we fast forward through 20 years, as he gains Michelin stars and deals with the challenges of running a restaurant in Paris. Most of the characters from the first half of the book (who we’ve come to know and love) are just dropped and are forgotten (until the last page) and instead the writer spends a lot of time grinding an axe about modern French cuisine, chef’s inspiration, and how the government is making things hard on French restaurants. All of these are interesting topics but they don’t fit well into this story.
I guess overall I felt like the story was deformed to fit into a particular ending, in a way that felt unnatural. It was a pity because the writing of the first half was really well done.
Now I’m waiting for the next book to become available at the library, so I am not sure what I’ll be reading next.
