There was a faded yellow typewritten letter in the window from the former tenant-a French guy who had run a bistro that thrived for a brief but bright couple of years-advising customers that the restaurant would just be closing for a two-week vacation and renovation. I was off that day, with big plans to sit on my couch procrastinating the writing of my novel-in-progress. I reasoned that it was a moderate way for me to make some money while I continued to write and to resolve my last lingering uncertainties about my place in a kitchen. I was just a three-month placeholder, during the dead season, which is why I felt fine taking the job. I had taken an interim chef job at one of those huge West Side Highway catering companies where I had formerly been a freelancer while they performed a thorough talent search to find their real next chef. Eric was sitting on the stoop in front of a longshuttered restaurant space mid-block, and as I zoomed by in my sweatpants and hastily slipped-on clogs, we waved. It's a twice a week early morning ritual, Mondays and Thursdays or Tuesdays and Fridays, depending on which side of the street you're on, in which everyone on the block with a car comes rushing out of their building to move their machines, still wearing their pajamas and with pillow creases still marking their faces. I didn't even know his last name, but we often saw each other during that hectic morning ritual of alternate side parking that New Yorkers, or at least East Villagers, seem to barely accomplish in time to beat the meter maid. I was just dashing out to park the car one spring morning, when I ran into my neighbor Eric, a guy I knew only peripherally from years of living on the same block. She writes a lot about her French mother in Blood, Bones & Butter and, as she tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz, her mother's discipline and sense of thrift heavily influenced her and her cooking.

Hamilton named her restaurant after the nickname her mother gave her as a girl. Ever.' But it's also the story of a young girl confused by her parents' sudden divorce, who turned to a life of crime and, perhaps even more perilous, restaurant work. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list), the aptly titled Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.īlood, Bones & Butter is the sort of hard-edged restaurant memoir we've come to expect from fellow New York chefs like Anthony Bourdain, who, coincidentally, described Hamilton's book as 'simply the best memoir by a chef.

During this time, the well-known chef also earned an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, something she put to use in writing her first book (which has already reached No.

Gabrielle Hamilton has been the chef and owner of Prune, a popular American nouveau restaurant in New York City's East Village, since 1999.

Blood bones and butter