Are you a born to be a chef? What would you sacrifice for three Michelin stars? Long time foreign correspondent for Forbes, Richard Morais, has created a moving, sharply revealing, often amusing novel of a raucous upwardly striving tribe of larger than life eccentrics – Indian and French -- told through the reminiscences of Hassan Haji – the first foreign born chef to receive Michelin’s three stars. A cook and passionate gourmand, as well as a seasoned journalist, Morais seems to know as much as any exile or cook what it means to be an exile and a cook.

        And it isn’t just scents of spicy fish curry and “lip puckering crème de cassis” that will keep you hungrily turning these pages, it is the scent of rotting forest, the warmth of bread carried home from the boulangerie, the “fecund aroma of orchids and suckling pig,” the heat of love-making in the hours between lunch and dinner service.

        Certainly he is a keen observer of obsession. His imagined culinary nun, Madame Mallory, is the enraged nemesis of the Haji family and their exuberant Maison Mumbai in a quiet Alpine village directly across the street from her precious and perfect two-starred Le Saule Pleureur. She is both a fiery avenger and the demanding mentor of the teenage Hassan. Of course she dissolves into tears as she first tastes the young cook's Indian food, “letting the flavors roll sensuously across her tongue.”  And it is she who directs Hassan’s fated passage from student to commis to cook, insisting he absorb everything she knows before he can even touch a paring knife in her kitchen.

        I stayed an hour late in my office Sunday night to finish the book, unable to stop before Hassan's dessert, savoring the bite of the author’s observations that emerge through his narrator: As he remembers the dismissiveness of Mallory toward Maison Mumbai, “the look of icy disdain that I would see many times again as I made my way through France in the coming years. A uniquely Gallic look of nuclear contempt for one’s inferiors.” 

        I can’t recall ever agreeing with any of the usually toxic pronouncements of Anthony Bourdain. But he’s right about “The Hundred-Foot Journey” (Scribner $23) being “heavily larded with the lushest, most high-sex food porn since Zola.” For him it’s “easily the best novel ever set in the world of cooking.”

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