I highly recommend this book to anyone with any sort of interest in food or cooking. I cook, because I have a family and I sort of enjoy it. That's about the extent of interest you need to have to find this book interesting, funny, profound, and highly enjoyable. The food itself is as much a character as the people Buford encounters (and boy, are they colorful!). Buford has a great gift for description - I could see everything he was talking about even though much of it was foreign to me (and to him). He becomes as swept away by his mission as I got reading the book. And the last section of the book, "Dinner With Mario," is as great an ending to a book as any fiction or thriller has ever had. I loved this book, and I will never look at food (in a restaurant, grocery store, or my kitchen) the same again.

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Heat is a great treat and must read for a foodie. There is a lot of information about the author's relationship with Mario Batali. He spent a lot of time working and learning in Babbo, one of Batali's restaurants. The book is also a culinary journey into Tuscan food. Mr. Buford has spent a lot of time in Italy learning how to make pasta, how to be a butcher, and just absorbing the lure of Italian cooking.

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Interesting take on what goes on in the kitchen of restaurants. In this book Mario is Jesus and his understudies are the disciples.

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This is a well told story of a New York writer who went to work for Mario Batali at Babbo before journeying to Italy to learn more about the food and the language. He learns pasta and butchering as told with insight and humor. Prepare to be hungry.

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This book is for people who really love to cook or really love to eat. Buford goes into depth exploring his passion (food and how to prepare it). At times the reader finds themselves saying, "Enough. Next, please!" Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable look into the inner workings of a high stakes restaurant and I would recommend reading it. Beware, however, that this is not a book that you can read in one sitting-- I had to read a chapter or two at time and I suspect others will have a similar experience.

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An interesting book to listen to, although I don't know if I would have enjoyed reading it as much. The author meets Mario Battali on an informal basis and becomes interested in (a) Mario as a individual in re: how he became a world-class chef and (b) how one actually becomes a chef. The rest of the book covers the author's work in Battali's kitchen, visits to chefs Battali worked for and with, trips to learn to make pasta the way Battali makes it, and his apprenticeship with a butcher who worked with Battali's father at one point. However what seems to be a very Battali-centric book becomes much more - a book about food and our attitudes towards food and the author's efforts to understand the whole foodie culture. By the end, I recognized that Battali was really just a framework for the author to hang his story on and not the focus of the book at all

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This is an entertaining book that is great if you're interested in "behind the scenes" at a top restaurant or if you're more broadly interested in where your food comes from. I found the first part of the book, while the author is working at Babbo, and the second part of the book, while he's at a butcher shop in Tuscany, to be almost different books, but both were really interesting. The author is great at writing scenes that you can easily visualize.

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