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Overview
"That skinny Indian teenager has that mysterious something that comes along once a generation. He is one of those rare chefs who is simply born. He is an artist."
And so begins the rise of Hassan Haji, the unlikely gourmand who recounts his life’s journey in Richard Morais’s charming novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey. Lively and brimming with the colors, flavors, and scents of the kitchen, The Hundred-Foot Journey is a succulent treat about family, nationality, and the mysteries of good taste.
Born above his grandfather’s modest restaurant in Mumbai, Hassan first experienced life through intoxicating whiffs of spicy fish curry, trips to the local markets, and gourmet outings with his mother. But when tragedy pushes the family out of India, they console themselves by eating their way around the world, eventually settling in Lumière, a small village in the French Alps.
The boisterous Haji family takes Lumière by storm. They open an inexpensive Indian restaurant opposite an esteemed French relais—that of the famous chef Madame Mallory—and infuse the sleepy town with the spices of India, transforming the lives of its eccentric villagers and infuriating their celebrated neighbor. Only after Madame Mallory wages culinary war with the immigrant family, does she finally agree to mentor young Hassan, leading him to Paris, the launch of his own restaurant, and a slew of new adventures.
The Hundred-Foot Journey is about how the hundred-foot distance between a new Indian kitchen and a traditional French one can represent the gulf between different cultures and desires. A testament to the inevitability of destiny, this is a fable for the ages—charming, endearing, and compulsively readable.
Editorials
From the Publisher
“Serious foodies will swoon. Morais throws himself into the kind of descriptive writing that makes reading a gastronomic event.”—Washington Post Book Review
“The novel’s charm lies in its improbability: it’s ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ meets ‘Ratatouille.’”
—New York Times Book Review
Ligaya Mishan
There is something absurdly over the top about the food world—the kitchens awash in testosterone, the eternal flames, the flaunting of knives and burns, the lives laid waste in pursuit of what is, let's face it, a fleeting sensual pleasure. It's a setting ripe for farce, and Morais is at his best when he delivers that.—The New York Times
Yvonne Zipp
Serious foodies will swoon over the meals in Richard C. Morais's The Hundred-Foot Journey…Morais throws himself into the kind of descriptive writing that makes reading a gastronomic event, whether it's a 12-course meal or Hassan's first egg-salad sandwich…—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
With his debut novel, longtime Forbes magazine correspondent Morais delves into a rich, imagery-filled culinary world that begins in Bombay and ends in Paris, tracing the career of Hassan Haji as he becomes a famed Parisian chef. Narrated by Hassan, the story begins with his grandfather starting a lowly restaurant in Bombay on the eve of WWII, which his father later inherits. But when tragedy strikes and Hassan’s mother is killed, the Hajis leave India, and, after a brief and discontented sojourn in England, destiny leads them to the quaint French alpine village of Lumière. There, the family settles, bringing Indian cuisine to the unsuspecting town, provoking the ire of Madame Mallory, an unpleasant but extremely talented local chef. From vibrantly depicted French markets and restaurant kitchens to the lively and humorously portrayed Haji family, Morais engulfs the reader in Hassan’s wondrous world of discovery. Regardless of one’s relationship with food, this novel will spark the desire to wield a whisk or maybe just a knife and fork.. (July)Kirkus Reviews
Precise descriptive writing offers much to savor in this bouillabaisse of a first novel from a former Forbes editor. Written at the suggestion of Morais's late friend, noted film producer Ismail Merchant, it's the story of a Muslim boy born in Mumbai who grows up to achieve great fame in the rarefied world of French cuisine. Hassan Haji narrates, beginning with the tale of his grandfather's profitable enterprise: a fleet of "snack-bicycles" delivering lunches to soldiers and laborers in the streets of downtown (then) Bombay in the 1930s. Innovations inspire Hassan's ambitious father Abbas, whose mixed history of achievements and frustrations includes the creation of a popular restaurant ("Bollywood Nights") and a bitter rivalry with a sleek, superrich fellow entrepreneur. When Abbas moves his family to a small village (Lumiere) in France's Jura Mountains, he learns he has trespassed onto territory appropriated by grande dame Gertrude Mallory, an imperious avatar of fine dining who will brook no challenges from brown-skinned "inferiors." Madame Mallory is such a formidable presence (equal parts Lady Bountiful and Falstaff) that she very nearly rescues this repetitive tale from its many longueurs-especially when she inadvertently causes severe physical harm to the innocent Hassan, of whom she will reluctantly whisper "that skinny Indian teenager has that mysterious something that comes along in a chef once a generation." Predictably, Hassan braves his father's wrath, becomes Mme. Mallory's apprentice-protege and rises like a souffle to prize-winning chef-hood in the appreciative atmosphere of Paris. Will this book eventually become a Merchant-Ivory film, laden with choice roles for Indian actors and featuring (a no-brainer, this) Meryl Streep as Mme. Mallory? An appetizing idea, n'est-ce pas?Agent: Richard Pine/InkWell ManagementThe Barnes & Noble Review
I have a passion for cooking, but I wouldn't go near a professional kitchen. I've read enough to know that chefs have a lot in common with gladiators, or perhaps berserkers is more accurate: they're lunatics with fierce aggression and good knife skills. Of course, that makes them fascinating. The great chef biographies -- Heat, Kitchen Confidential, Cooking Dirty -- have a place of pride on my bookshelf, cheek by jowl with The Complete Robuchon. I don't even lend them out.
So I come to a novel that purports to be the biography of a chef with sharpened knives: if the fictional cook can't brunoise properly, I'll gloat over it. In fact, I started The Hundred-Foot Journey fairly convinced that, without a background in a professional kitchen, Richard C. Morais couldn't possibly succeed (which, in retrospect, is like saying that Shakespeare was bound to flub Julius Caesar because he'd never been a dictator).
But The Hundred-Foot Journey blew my smug preconceptions to bits. Morais's fictional biography captures the dirt, passion, and madness of a chef's life and spices it with one extra ingredient: he can really write. The best chefs have an enthralling, if raw, intensity, and while Anthony Bourdain, for one, slings his ink with panache, most writing chefs tend to rocket through a life marked by food, sex, and drugs with the same curt bravado with which they survive nightly service; it's often hard to discern why they chose such a brutal career. Morais, on the other hand, so deftly weaves food into the fabric of every moment that one can't imagine his protagonist doing anything in life except cooking.
The Hundred-Foot Journey is written from the point-of-view of Hassan Haji, an inspired cook who can see in a woman's locks, for example, "an intricate cocoon of finely spun threads, translucent in the light, as if a chef had taken a blowtorch to sugar and woven threads of candied filaments through her hair." This is a novel in which every moment, every observation, speaks to the way food doesn't merely nourish, but enchants.
It begins when Hassan is a young boy whose family runs a restaurant in Mumbai. They move to London and on to France, opening a modest Indian bistro across the road from a patrician temple of haute cuisine. Hassan turns his back on Indian food in order to apprentice at the cross-road rival; years later he conquers Paris with his own three-star Michelin establishment.
One of the most striking characters in the novel is Hassan's mentor, a brilliant chef named Madame Mallory. When Hassan's family first establishes the huge, garish Maison Mumbai across from her culinary landmark, she responds with utter fury. It's not until her rage precipitates a terrible accident that she realizes the extent of her vanity and selfishness. That revelation comes while looking at a boar's head on a plate: "in the depths of those glinting little eyes she sees the balance sheet of her life." What the reader finds, through her eyes and Hassan's, are lives whose events are accompanied by a cascade of flavors and smells. Indeed, Hassan sums up his life as the movement from one smell to the next, as here: "[I] unceremoniously turned on my heel, to continue on my journey down the Rue Mouffetard, leaving behind the intoxicating smells of machli ka salan, an olfactory wisp of who I was, fading fast into the Parisian night. "
Whether you are only an armchair chef, or even a denizen of the steamy depths of a professional kitchen, you will be enchanted by this book.
--Eliosa James