The lamb’s neck dish, for instance, was something I tasted a version of at San Francisco’s Incanto, and Alinea in Chicago was doing a whole chocolate menthol geode thing when I was there a few years back. For the most part, I just relied on a lifetime of eating and cooking, which could have been described as “greed” until now, but which we will now commence calling “research” instead. Michelle Wildgen: I’m a home cook and not a professional, but I have enough familiarity with it to feel comfortable describing some of the process and problems of cooking, whether it’s resting your meat or not lowering the temp of your frying oil by over-crowding it. I wonder, what kind of research did you do for writing so intimately about the making of the food in the book? Did you cook the dishes that we get to read about? The slicing of fish has never sounded sexier than when you write about it here, for example.

It was my pleasure to speak with Wildgen about the world’s best waiter, editing a dish versus an essay, and the supreme goodness of the French fry.Įmma Komlos-Hrobsky: For me, a chief pleasure of Bread and Butter lies in not just vicariously tasting all the food being served and eaten by the brothers, but in savoring the sensory details of its preparation as you describe it. It’s a novel filled not only with the intricate stuff of cooking of the highest order, but of sibling rivalry and affections, as temperamental as any soufflé. Now, in her third novel, Bread and Butter, Wildgen follows three brothers running two very different restaurants: Leo and Britt’s smartly-polished Winesap, and younger brother Harry’s envelope-pushing startup, Stray. As an editor at Tin House, she’s brought food writing to the table from the likes of Francine Prose, Steve Almond and Ann Hood.

As culinary and literary mentor, she took me for my first scoop of pear and blue cheese ice cream and gave me my first copy of MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me. Michelle Wildgen is a writer of impeccable tastes.

Bread and butter by michelle wildgen