cover image SUPER CHEF: The Making of the Great Modern Restaurant Empires

SUPER CHEF: The Making of the Great Modern Restaurant Empires

Juliette Rossant, . . Free Press, $25 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-4171-7

This plodding group biography traces the careers and personal lives of chefs Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Palmer, Todd English, Mary Sue Milliken, Susan Feniger and Tom Colicchio. Rossant, who has covered chefs for Forbes , begins unevenly by failing to define in her introduction what a "super chef" is, merely stating, "Most chefs who reach Super Chef level are well liked, hardworking, and irrepressibly optimistic people." She dedicates a chapter to each subject—except for Milliken and Feniger, who work as a team and are covered together—before reaching the conclusion that the hot topic among chefs today is branding. A glossary with definitions of terms like "Fast Food Restaurant" and "Hoisin Sauce" provides a puzzling finish. Rossant's style is often awkward ( "It was the height of disco, and a few months after his divorce Wolfgang met Barbara Lazaroff at a discotheque"). Although she discusses the chefs' failures—e.g., Palmer recalls a partnership in a dairy that went poorly—she glosses over unpleasant events, dismissing Colicchio's dispute with his Gramercy Tavern employer, Danny Meyer, over the opening of Craft, a New York restaurant, in a couple of paragraphs. Rossant conveys coziness with her subjects by using their first names, even referring to Milliken and Feniger as "the Girls," and frequently resorts to "some" sourcing ("Some have said that the 1999 Grimes article in the New York Times marked a serious embarrassment if not decline for Charlie"), thus never appearing to pass negative judgment. Even the inclusion of a transcript of English's MTV appearance and romance gossip fail to sizzle. Photos. (May 4)

Forecast: It's hard to gauge who the audience for this collection of biographies might be. Even culinary students aspiring to super-chefdom are unlikely to cough up $25 for this rather slapdash hardcover, and fans of celebrity chefs probably aren't interested in the humdrum details of launching new ventures.