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Appetite City: A Culinary History Of New York (2009)

by William Grimes(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0865476926 (ISBN13: 9780865476929)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

North Point Press

review 1: Caveat: I read only to the end of Chapter 8, which goes through the turn of the 20th century.As the former restaurant critic for the Times, Grimes certainly knows food. He’s at his best when he allows himself to discuss it in detail—as in the paragraph where he explains how turtle soup was made in the 1850s. Yet those moments are relatively few. The book reads like the survey its footnotes reveal it to be: Grimes distills most of his information from other, more specific, books or from newspaper accounts that are, in themselves, distillations, and what he gains in scope he often loses in texture. How, for instance, can Grimes quote only a single line from “Hot Corn,” a mid-nineteenth century “moralizing novel about the miseries and temptations of the city’s ... moremost visible street vendors”? While there are some wonderful moments here—I can never grow tired of comparisons of old New York to today's city, such as takeout in 1813 and the lunch rush in the 1850s—the book is, most often, neither comprehensive enough to satiate nor incisive enough to be its own reward. New York history, on the other hand, remains endlessly fascinating, and I am eager to dive deeper into many of the events, trends, and topics Grimes glosses here.
review 2: Hot dog, this book was interesting. It covers the rise of restaurant culture in New York City from its days as a Dutch colony to present, and leaves nothing out along the way. Each successive decade changed food culture dramatically, from NYC's roots as an oyster shack town, to bizarre turn of the century eating clubs, to the splendor brought by World's Fairs, to destruction of prohibition, to how boring the 70s were...its all there, it's all well researched, and it's all fantastic. And the best part? Anthony Bourdain is never mentioned. less

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