Scars of a Chef

Chef and cookbook author Tramonto (Steak with Friends) has won acclaim for his restaurants and cookbooks, and in this memoir he takes readers into the kitchen to show them a chef's life. It ain't pretty, but it is edifying. As he was growing up in a volatile working-class family in Rochester, N.Y., Tramonto's dad was jailed for embezzlement, and young Rick, struggling with a learning disability, left high school in 1977 for his first culinary job, at Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers. He paid dues all along the way, working with terrifically talented and not a few temperamental chefs, succeeding (earning four-star reviews) and failing (losing a restaurant to fire, divorcing his culinary partner and wife, Gale Gand). As he narrates it, only when he hears a Christian radio broadcast one dark day in his car does he begin to find a way out. Tramonto and his co-writer favor speed over detail and successfully convey how driven and intensely focused the author's career has been. Anyone with a romantic view of the restaurant business should read this mea culpa and redemption tale. (Mar.)