These essays were quick fun reads that got a bit repetitive if I read too many in a row. I enjoyed learning that cooking experts could make mistakes as easily as amateur cooks and I thought that some of the fixes they came up with were interesting.I would recommend this book to anyone who likes food and knows something about cooking.One quick question: why did they use “don’t try this at home” for the title? There has to be a catchier phrase that would have better defined the book. No one in the...

This was an interesting collection of essays from celebrity chefs all over the United States. I only knew a handful of their names: Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, Eric Ripert, Michel Richard, and Marcus Samuels. The rest of the bunch, I had no idea who they were. The short biographies before each essay were nice but not really that helpful. I think a picture of each celebrity chef would have really enhanced the book. Of the essays, the writing was really mix...

Before your favorite chef was your favorite, you know that they all had to come from somewhere. This book is a collection of humble beginnings, failures and fiascoes that all built up the greatest culinary minds of the generation. Reading this book was a good reminder that everything great comes from a mess of failures, and that a stroke of creativity at the right time can make all the difference. It was also nice to read something from the late Anthony Bourdain, whose legacy still lives on in h...

If I learned two things from this book it is these:1. English chefs have oddball senses of humour.2. American chefs take themselves too seriously.

Kitchen nightmares, blunders and fuck ups, who doesn't had any!? In Dont try this at home we get Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs, and reading this has been a absolute blast. We get stories from greats like Anthony Bordain, Jamie Oliver,  Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Raymond Blanc and Michel Roux, you might not know all of them but these are some of the best chefs in the world, and reading them fuck up, and i mean fuck up so badly is fun to read. All these are short stor...

Don't try *what* at home? Acting like a pompous chef who knows it all and wants to tell you that you certainly don't? Reminds me of Chopped on the Food Network where some chefs get all snotty because they went to culinary school and other chefs, sorry 'cooks', didn't. There is only one true way of judging food - did you enjoy it or not? Who cares who prepared it or what training they had? If the food is awful then the fact it was prepared by a graduate of the Culinary Arts Institute isn't going

An impossibly opulent wedding, with a $30,000 cake included and everything planned down to the last detail, comes up against an unexpected snag. A very creative chef thinks up a grand menu for New Year’s Eve at his restaurant. An apprentice teenager navigating a tiny restaurant with a huge tray refuses help. A culinary student sets out to impress a professor and his wife with nothing less than pheasant…Not all of the very personal confessions and reminiscences of the many chefs whose essays comp...

A collection of short essays written by chefs about some of the worst mistakes they've made during their careers. Funny, but a bit repetitive as many of them have made similar mistakes.

Forty chefs have each written a chapter in this book, accounts of something that went wrong in the kitchen. I found it best to read just a few chapters at a time, because there was enough similarity to the stories that it seemed monotonous to read more at one sitting.

A very funny, over the top collection of stories from famous chefs, both television or not. This one looks at those days when things go very very very wrong, and a chef finds themselves in the middle of chaos. Considering that many in that chaos are angry, have short tempers and are usually handling sharp knives, heavy items or scalding water, it can get real ugly, real fast. A terrific read for any foodie and cautionary tales for those who are considering a career as a professional chef. Recomm...

This was a really entertaining collection of short stories from professional chefs about their kitchen disasters. Some have lessons to learn, others are like watching a car crash in slow motion. A few of them felt less like a disaster and more like a dumb mistake (oh, waaaah you drank shots all night during service and it was the worst night ever - that's not a kitchen disaster, but a really dumb decision), but for the most part I enjoyed it.

"The lobsters are off!". . . is not something you want to hear when you are catering a dinner for thirty-two hundred people.And this is only one dilemma faced by chefs and would-be-chefs in this book of collected tales detailing all that can, AND WILL go wrong in the culinary world.Here is every disaster imaginable, from an overly sensitive sprinkler system to a kitchen floor squirming with escaped eels.Mario Batali exacts a "salty" revenge before walking out on a nightmare boss.Anthony Bourdain...

Cast in its most positive light, with the exception of language that is, in my opinion, inappropriate to the situation or the reading audience, this collection of chefs' "outrageous true tales" depicts the restaurant industry as the "downstairs" of the Public Television series Upstairs Downstairs. What societal pressures created these often mean spirited chefs and cooks who cannot ask for help, identify that they even need help, or acknowledge (at the time, to the customer) the food "catastrophe...

Anyone who has ever worked in the restaurant business could tell a story about it..one that could either make you laugh or cry. I have just re-read this book for the 4th time and it still brings tears to my eyes; it's that funny.This is the most entertainment a person could get from some the the worlds greatest chefs. The mix between personality and REAL situations they find themselves in. Im just really glad these chefs shared their stories and someone put into a book.

I had fun reading this during 2020, I just wanted to also leave a note that there's some surprise ablism in one of the stories. I'll link this other site's rebuttal.http://waftb.net/node/329Other than that, I was entertained! (I can't remember if I had any other, less drastic objections. It was 2020 and who can brain lol.)

Funny stories about life behind the swinging kitchen doors. The writing isn't exactly stunning (there's a reason these people are chefs and not storytellers), but it made for good quick reading just before bed.

This book was...fine. But I am not sure many of the vignettes really count as catastrophes. In most of them, the plot line is "something happened to my ingredients and I had to think quick! Which I did." Which is not really gripping reading. One? One was an actual disaster. (It involved black pepper hollandaise sauce.)Overall the book was pleasant enough.

I love to read Anthony Bourdain! He is brilliant Honest and sarcastic. He is more than willing to be self-deprecating and call others on their BS. So when I saw a book featuring short tales from various famous and infamous [Mario Batali] chefs I grabbed it. Unfortunately most chefs aren't Anthony Bourdain; most are apparently pompous little snots. Too often their culinary catastrophes occurred when they were very young, were blamed upon another or were just so boring you couldn't care. When read...

Most of the stories in this book were either hilarious or embarrassing, which makes me applaud the chefs that wrote them for sharing such moments! I won't say all the stories really grab the reader but they are all intimate stories of working in kitchens all over the world. They give a true day in the life of a chef, and I feel that anyone who wants to be a chef should read this book before diving into that world.

I've had this on my Kindle forever and finally got around to finishing it on a recent cross-country flight. It's the kind of book you can start, stop, and pick back up again months later because each chapter is its own unique story. I found many of the chefs' stories hilarious. I'm pretty sure other people on the flight wondered why I was laughing so much. If you love food and dining out, this is a quick and fun read.