Reviewed by Jess MacMurray

Andrew Todhunter, an American writer, had been apprenticing in the kitchen at Taillevent, a venerated restaurant in the finest French tradition, when he and his wife had dinner there on Bastille Day. The couple enjoyed superior service and extraordinary food while contemplating their own role in the ongoing culinary ceremony. This memorable dinner is the frame on which his experience will be hung, between two tasteful wine-colored covers etched with gold script.

A Meal Observed unfolds gently, beginning in a parked car, moving through a bottle of Chevalier-Montrachet, escargot in a foamy lemon-colored sauce, semi-hard goat cheese and an ice cream that Todhunter equates with Mozart. Between courses, he develops the characters—the intense and legendary chef, Phillipe Legendre, the equally brilliant and honored pastry chef, Gilles Bajolle—tours the kitchen and the process. It’s a tight little idea, exploring the brigade-de-cuisine and the ceremony, the rituals with the philosophy of French restaurants, through a single meal.

The narrative moves deftly between the calm, seamless dream of the dining room and the disciplined, but passionate, realm of the kitchen. Todhunter’s research is thorough and impressive, his touch just right when he’s in the restaurant—either at the table or in the kitchen with the chefs. He is self-deprecating enough to admit when he’s nervous talking to the wine steward, and so brings readers not only into the rarefied world at Taillevent, but to the heart of what it’s like to be an American—or this one, at least—in the midst of such refinement and tradition.

The staff at Taillevent is generous, the descriptions of The Fabulous Meal are lovely, and the interplay between kitchen and table is nicely balanced. Todhunter’s tone changes to suit his subject—he is dreamy and hypnotized at the table, measured and focused while in the kitchen. At Taillevent, this shifting works—but when he shifts to Wyoming as an Outward Bound participant, chit-chatting about buffalo wings and jelly doughnuts, or eating on a fire escape with a friend while a riot plays out on the Berkeley street below, the spell is definitively broken. Todhunter is introspective and wry, and a likeable narrator, but the thread of his Fabulous Meal is broken too often for marginally-related tangents about his own culinary past.