The Bobby Gold Stories

by Anthony Bourdain, Breaulove Swells Whimsy

Overview

From the host of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and New York Times bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential, a crime novel about a lovable criminal, a fabulous cook, and a botched robbery that sets the pair on the run.

After doing ten years in the clinker, Bobby Gold out and ready for work. With not even an attempt to play it straight, he's back to breaking bones for tough guys. His turf: the club scene and restaurant racket. It's not that he enjoys the job—Bobby has real heart—but he's good at it and a guy has to make a living. Things change when he meets Nikki, the cook at a club most definitely not in his territory. Smitten, he can't stay away. Bobby Gold had known trouble before, but with Nikki the sauté bitch in his life, things take a turn for life or death.

A fast, furious, pitch-perfect story of food, sex, crime, and mayhem, The Bobby Gold Stories is Bourdain at his best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582344096
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	06/19/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	292,965
Product dimensions:	5.89(w) x 8.19(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

Chef and author Anthony Bourdain wrote the New York Times bestselling memoirs Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw, and A Cook’s Tour; the collection The Nasty Bits; the novels Bone in the Throat, The Bobby Gold Stories, andGone Bamboo; the biography Typhoid Mary; and the cookbooks Appetites and Les Halles Cookbook.

Bourdain was the host of the Emmy and Peabody Award–winning docuseries Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown on CNN, and prior to that hosted the Emmy Award–winning No Reservations and The Layover on the Travel Channel and The Taste on ABC.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

June 25, 1956

Date of Death:

June 8, 2018

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

Kaysersberg-Vignoble, Haut-Rhin, France

Education:

High school diploma, Dwight Englewood School, 1973; A.O.S. degree, The Culinary Institute of America, 1978

Website:

http://www.anthonybourdain.com/

Editorial Reviews

“Bourdain cooks as a writer.” —New York Times

“Bourdain is a great observer, and his profane dialogue should come with a warning: This plate is hot.” —People

“The chef wields his pen with the same murderously winning flair as he does his knives.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Delicate culinary conversation, flavored with streetwise bravado.” —New York Daily News

“The perfect thriller-or a delicious soup du jour.” —Rocky Mountain News

From the Publisher

With the same explosive energy and irreverent humor with which he described the behind-the-scenes affairs of the restaurant industry in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain revisits some of the themes that made him famous: passion, food and violence. The novel (Bourdain's third, after Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo) tells the story of Bobby Gold, probably the world's most unlikely gangster. A nice Jewish pre-med student implicated in a drug deal gone bad, Bobby goes to prison for 10 years and emerges with an entirely different set of uses for his knowledge of anatomy. Once released, he goes to work for his old friend Eddie Fish, a mobster turned nightclub owner, and falls in love with Nikki, a boisterous sous-chef with dangerous ambitions. Bobby and Nikki get involved in a botched robbery, forcing both to run for their lives. Their seedy shenanigans are wittily chronicled by Bourdain, in his nouveau hard-boiled prose ("'You want truffle jiz? Get your own truffle jiz, cabron' "). In one memorable set piece, Bobby engages in multiple pages of rueful conversation with an old fish wholesaler who's late on a payment to Eddie and knows he's about to be worked over (" `I get to pick the arm?' `Sure,' said Bobby. `Your choice. You pick it' "). Readers will once again be delighted by Bourdain's charming, rugged sensibility, like a modern-day Damon Runyon, and his gourmet blend of wit, suspense and style. 10-city author tour. (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Bestselling chef (A Cook's Tour, 2001, etc.) and mystery author Bourdain (Gone Bamboo, 1997, etc.) recounts in 12 swift-moving segments the sad-hearted luck of an ex-con nightclub bouncer. Bobby Gold-neé Goldstein-has taken the rap for his slick friend Eddie Fish all his life: eight years for a framed cocaine charge, then employment as Eddie's debonair Lower Manhattan henchman. But Bobbie is smart (he studied premed and knows just how to make a clean snap of the radial ulna), diplomatic at his tough-guy tasks at the NiteKlub, and even slightly ashamed at this point in his life of having to rough up customers to get Eddie's late payments. Bobby's romantic to boot, as he learns when he catches the eye of Nikki, "the sauté bitch," who's having trouble not sleeping with bad-boy cooks. Tired of "the business"-slinging monkfish in truffle risotto night after night at NiteKlub-she wants to make money "by doing something illegal," and, though Bobbie wants out of the mob fire, he ends up taking the rap for her, too, when she steals money out of NiteKlub's safe and has to disappear. Bourdain has a Bellovian relish for depicting the small-town gangster-pathetic, hilarious, human-and the dialogue keeps the action gurgling merrily along despite the flinging viscera. Bourdain's favorite locus, of course, is the kitchen: the blow jobs for the best staff meals, the tightly protected territory of each cook in the line, the cocaine-snorting chef and hostess in the backroom. With a few short, sharp strokes, he delineates fully fleshed, deeply flawed, powerfully sympathetic characters. Set aside the plot: Bourdain's dialogue is worth the price of the meal, as in the scene at a Manhattan restaurant when"citizen of the world" Eddie questions every item on the cryptic menu, to the mortification of his waiter: "Wasabi . . . Wasabi . . . Was that a good thing or a bad thing?" The chef wields his pen with the same murderously winning flair as he does his knives. Author tour

Kirkus Reviews