This book is touted on the cover blurb as being the follow-up to Brick Lane, despite the fact that Ms Ali had another (not terribly well-received) book published in the interim. In The Kitchen centres on Gabriel Lightfoot, Gabe for short, who is executive chef in the kitchen of the swanky Imperial Hotel in London. Gabriel’s life begins to unravel when kitchen porter Yuri is found dead in the basement, and also when he discovers that up north his Dad is dying of cancer.
I thought Ali dealt well with the multi-cultural aspects (as one might expect from someone who has written something as brilliant as Brick Lane), the character of Lena who Gabriel gets friendly is excellently written, and her Russian dialect perfectly captured. However, sometimes it felt as if Gabe was asking the various members of his cooking team their stories as a way of dumping information upon the reader. Ms Ali has clearly done a lot of research (she lists a whole heap of books she has relied on for research), but some of it was unnecessary – I think she mentions the fact that proteins are ‘denatured’ in the cooking process three times! I saw her speak about the book at the Hay Literary Festival, and she actually spent some time in a hotel kitchen observing.
I enjoyed the first three quarters of the book immensely. Then something changed. At the point when Gabe starts to ‘lose his mind’, the narrative stopped working for me. I don’t want to say more as it will ruin the plot. So until the last section I enjoyed the book, the characters were mostly well-formed (apart from Gleeson, I just couldn’t get my head around him).
3 out of 5.
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