WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 37Author Profile
finally finished the draft, which I thought was pretty good, he
said, ‘It’s a good book.’ And I said, ‘Well Sonny, I’m going to
do my revisions to make it a great book.’ He said, ‘It’s not a
great book, it’s a good book.’ It delayed my finishing the book
by a year. And then last summer he phoned me. He wasn’t well
and he’d lost his voice again. He said, ‘I don’t know what you
did, but it’s great.’ ”
Buford, 65, has a voice that’s somewhere between gravelly
and growly, and he speaks in bursts and pauses, often stopping
midsentence, during which time his upper lip will turn inward
and he’ll work it slightly before resuming. He looks a bit gruff,
like someone who might show up at your door if you are late
paying some money you owe to a very bad dude. And yet, here
he is having a bowl of bouillabaisse and leaning forward when
he talks to make sure his voice is heard on the recorder in a loud
room. Or maybe he just hunches. In any event, he’s a nice guy
(seriously, check out his Twitter), quick to smile.
Buford was born in Baton Rouge, La. His dad was in the
Air Force, and a posting took the family to Southern California
when Buford was five. He later went to UC Berkeley and then
to Cambridge. At Cambridge, in 1979, he founded Granta.
His last issue was in 1995, and during his time at the maga-
zine, it became the kind of publication you’d find in the hands
of very discerning readers who were serious about their litera-
ture. He left Granta to take over the fiction editor post at an
obscure little periodical called the New Yorker.
By then Buford had published his well-received Among the
Thugs (1992), a horrifying and very funny study of English
football violence in the 1980s. (A nod to Buford’s literary cred:
early in Thugs he writes about attending his first English foot-
ball match with two unnamed friends; he says they were
Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa.)
Buford’s second book, Heat (2006), was a bestseller. In it,
he documented his life as a “kitchen slave” at Babbo, one of
Mario Batali’s Manhattan restaurants, and his adventures
learning the art of Tuscan butchery from a flamboyant eighth-
generation Italian butcher.
Batali was a huge piece of the book, which at the time was
quite an asset. But the world we live in now is not the same
as the one in which Heat was written. Then, Batali was a
gregarious chef and popular food TV personality; now he is a
#MeToo pariah facing charges of sexual harassment and
assault. Even so, in Heat, Batali’s boorishness is on full
display.
“It’s in the book,” Buford says after a long pause when Batali
is brought up. “I’ve avoided talking about it, but let’s just say
it’s all there.”
Dirt is big, 400-something pages, and the longest thing
Buford has written. It started out as a pretty simple idea: go
to Paris, work in a kitchen for a few months, bang out a book.
This idea was jangling around in Buford’s head well before
Obama was elected, right after he wrapped up Heat. Basically,
do Heat in France.
One problem: the French really didn’t care about Buford or
his book. If he wanted to go, which at that point meant taking
his family (he and his wife, Jessica Green, a magazine editor
turned wine expert, had preschool-age twin boys at the time),
there would be beaucoup paperwork to fill out for their resi-
dency permits. So they did, and with a little fraudulent help
from a well-placed friend, the Lyonnaise chef Daniel Boulud,
they were in. Which was another problem: then they were
there. And in Lyon, not Paris.
What follows is a mix of memoir, culinary anthropology,
and immersion journalism, all told in Buford’s hallmark eru-
dite and ruthlessly self-effacing way. Early life in Lyon was a
parade of difficulties and humiliations: contending with the
French fetish for bureaucracy; finding an apartment; failing
to find a kitchen to work in; finally getting work, only to be
bullied by a 19-year-old kitchen psychopath; coming to
realize that strangers thought Buford was a local in a city
where, he writes, the men are all “ugly fuckers.”
“It was a wild thing we did. Really, a wild thing,” Buford
says. “Because we get there, and everything’s going wrong and
I can’t get into a kitchen, and I think, ‘Well, what the fuck?
Now what?’ Then I got into a kitchen where any reasonable
person would say, ‘Why didn’t you get out of there?’ But of
course, as a writer, that’s what you want.”
The job Buford landed at the Michelin-starred restaurant
La Mère Brazier required 15-plus-hour days in a kitchen
where the culture resembled that of a pirate ship. The labor
was so demanding and physical that he wound up losing
weight working in a place where the recipes measured butter
in kilos.
“I liked it a lot,” Buford says. “I think I enjoy physical
activity, but I’ve got kind of a desk brain. So, the pleasure of
the situation—La Mère Brazier was different because it was
so intense—is you can have a reflecting brain while you’re
doing a physical activity. It helps that I know that I’m going
to be writing about it.”
There are intellectual pursuits in the book as well as the
demented rigors of the kitchen. Not to give anything away,
but a turning point Buford discovers in the controversial
history of interplay among Italian and French food (if you
want to piss off the French, tell them French cuisine is actu-
ally Italian in origin, as Buford did repeatedly) will have
people who care about such things looking at their ragù
differently.
The Bufords ended up staying in Lyon for five years. They
sold their Manhattan apartment. The twins went native. And
when the family moved back to New York, the boys had
trouble with English. Buford, meanwhile, has long given up
his desk at the New Yorker and is now set to embark on some-
thing new. He can’t say yet what it is, but know this: it’s
gotten a cold reception.
“My agent doesn’t like it. My wife doesn’t like it,” he says.
“But I kind of like it.” ■