TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
What chefs think of James Patterson’s new thriller, ‘The Chef’
James Patterson publishes books faster than most people read them. Over a four-decade career, he’s produced 250 titles and sold more than 385 million copies.
Change Size
Author James Patterson (L) and former President Bill Clinton attend the book signing of 'The President is Missing' at Book Revue on June 28, 2018 in Huntington, New York (Shutterstock/Debby Wong)
J
ames Patterson publishes books faster than most people read them. Over a four-decade career, he’s produced 250 titles and sold more than 385 million copies. He usually employs some help: Bill Clinton famously received a co-author credit for The President Is Missing last year.
His new book was completed with Max DiLallo, one of his regular collaborators. (They last worked together on the thriller Stealing Gulfstreams in 2017.) The Chef, out on Feb. 18 from Little, Brown & Co., turns Patterson’s attention to the world of food, focusing on a policeman turned food truck operator in New Orleans who uncovers a terrorist threat during Mardi Gras.
The hero, Caleb Rooney, is a disgraced officer who now runs the Killer Chef food truck somewhere along Canal Street. It’s so popular he has lines around the block and more than 200,000 Instagram followers.
Over the course of the book, Rooney falls in love and stops a terrorist attack during the city’s biggest day of the year, while occasionally finding the time to munch on “the most mouthwatering Vietnamese pastries this side of Hanoi” and pop organic raw jalapeños that he keeps in a plastic bag in his pocket.
First introduced on Facebook Messenger, The Chef differs from other Patterson thrillers in that it includes an appendix with a half-dozen recipes inspired by the Killer Chef food truck, including ones for savory grits, dirty rice with crawfish boudin, and the “signature” Cajun-style scrambled egg po’ boy.
We asked two New Orleans food experts—Emery Whalen, chief executive officer of QED Hospitality, and chef Brian Landry, her business partner—what they thought of The Chef. Their projects include the Jack Rose restaurant and popular rooftop bar Hot Tin, both at the Pontchartrain Hotel in the city’s Garden District. Whalen’s and Landry’s thoughts are below.
The City
Whalen: The book opens by saying locals call New Orleans “Nawlins.” No, we don’t. That’s the No. 1 tipoff that you’re a tourist.
Landry: There’s a recent Saturday Night Live skit that plays up the NOLA clichés. It gives you a perfect perspective of how you should read this book—like an SNL skit.
Whalen: Whether it’s racial stereotypes, what it’s like to be a chef, how to run a food truck, it’s both exaggerated and oversimplified. That’s why the plot has so many twists. There are Muslim terrorists! White nationalists! Gangs from the hood that wear the same-color bandana! It’s ridiculous.
Landry: The people are so Frenchified, you would think everyone here talks with an accent. They don’t.
Whalen: We recognize that this book is pop fiction. We don’t take issue with the factual inaccuracies as much as the gross oversimplification and poor characterization of our city and its people.
(In a statement, Little Brown noted that as a novel, the book is not meant to be factual.)
The Truck
Landry: Anyone in the food industry will be offended by how little work this guy does to be a famous food truck chef. He comes and goes from the truck in the middle of service. His partner [ex-wife Marlene], who doesn’t seem to be able to cook, runs the truck just fine without him. There are hundreds of thousands of people in line for food. But if he wants to be a detective that day, he leaves and she runs the place, no problem. He works when he feels like it, they spend an hour cleaning it, and it’s all OK.
Whalen: They prep every day for 30 minutes, then open to thousands of people. It’s unclear when they cook the roast beef that takes hours to make.
Landry: A food truck is a small space, and there are a lot of rules in place. He breaks all of them. And he has 200,000 Instagram followers—that’s half of the city’s population.
Whalen: One thing that’s so appealing about NOLA’s restaurants is that they are not scene-y. There are not paparazzi and celebrities littering the restaurants. And we definitely don’t have a hotshot Miami restaurateur creating a see-and-be-seen environment [like the book’s description of fictional restaurants Rosella and LBD]. That doesn’t exist here.
Landry: He says he grabs an organic green jalapeño chile pepper from a plastic baggie sticking out of his back pocket and pops it in his mouth for a spicy pick-me-up. Come on … No way this dude has any taste buds left.
Read also: Cheap but chic: Chef Bahtiar Sigar teaches #SobatMisqueen to cook in #MasakDarurat
The Food
Whalen: There’s a scene where Rooney is on a stakeout and cooks a roast beef po’ boy in his front seat using a portable mini hot plate that he plugs into his car. You don’t need our local viewpoint to tell you it’s ridiculous to consider cooking a sloppy roast beef po’ boy in the front seat of your car. Unless that’s where you live, in a van.
Landry: During a chase scene, the “hero” is walking around a dangerous neighborhood. He’s nervous but trying to find a clue. Then he smells BBQ shrimp cooking. And this idiot follows the smell. BBQ shrimp is a famed NOLA dish, and it’s not done on a grill, it’s made in a pan, or in the oven, or a little bit of both. Anyway, Rooney walks into this yard and finds an old woman working the grill and singing church hymns. And her secret recipe for BBQ shrimp is nutmeg, curry powder, and a splash of 7 Up. None of those ingredients are in BBQ shrimp, and I don’t think I’ll be trying that recipe anytime soon.
Whalen: At one point, he says his first course at a restaurant is grilled crawfish with a tangy ginger glaze laced with smoky-spicy Szechuan peppercorns.
Landry: I’m still trying to figure out how you grill crawfish.
Whalen: And then he plates an egg dish, adds a parsley sprig garnish, and sticks it in the warming drawer of the oven. So many things here. One: Who garnishes eggs with sprigs of parsley? Two: Once you’ve done that, why would you put it in a warming drawer to die?
Landry: As he’s trying to save the city from mass destruction and running his food truck and falling in love, he finds time to have elaborate four-course meals. And the fancy food he describes is not anything any of the chefs in this city would be proud of, by the way. Oyster-infused veal cheek served in an oyster shell with rhubarb aioli?
Whalen: To go back to the grilled crawfish—how do you even grill a crawfish? I have never come across them. At one point, the hero makes a reference to all the crawfish in the Gulf [of Mexico]. They aren’t a Gulf-water crustacean; they live in bayous and rice fields. The odds of me recommending this book to someone is the same as how many crawfish there are in the Gulf.
