The Hundred Foot Journey

Any book with descriptions of food has a head start on being a good book. That's my general assumption anyway. Richard C. Morais' book, The Hundred Foot Journey takes place mostly in the kitchen, either a French restaurant kitchen or an Indian kitchen. A goat cheese and pistachio souffle gets its own couple of paragraphs with words like minced and crusty and whipped egg whites, purification, miraculously, elegantly, artistic swirl. All good cooking words, and, by the way, good writing words. Still, I didn't much like this book. It had all sorts of potential, but didn't quite show up. The fact that I read about it while waiting for the dentist probably should have warned me away.

The writing isn't the problem, the story of a young Indian who moves with his crazy, grief-stricken family from the chaos of Mumbai to the Alpine hills of France to start a restaurant isn't the problem either. The only problem is that I'm sick of emotionally detached protagonists. If they don't care, why should I? Early on, Hassan Haji explains that his (future) failures with women is due to the murder of his mother. Well, okay, but his mother wasn't a strong enough character for me to care about that either. Hassan is always getting picked up by older women and having a great time in his rise to a owning his own Parisian restaurant, but he never stays with them, they're never important enough. When an old lover shows up, he dispatches her without a second thought. And he makes me not care either.

Well, he's a busy man--first leaving his family after a terrible accident (which doesn't seem to affect him that much), moving in with the family's arch enemy to learn "proper French cooking", leaving her to pursue his restaurant dreams in Paris, and then of course, he's busy, busy, busy with restaurant life.

Morais has got some nice details about restaurant life, life moving on from tragedy, life around food, life in France (and even some good descriptions of life in Mumbai) so The Hundred Foot Journey is a decent read, especially if sense of place is appealing to you.Just don't expect to love or understand the main character.