With a popular TV show and a successful New York restaurant empire, Mario Batali is probably the most famous chef in America who actually matters to the rest of the food world (Bam! Back at you, Emeril). This explains why Bill Buford's wife freaked when he invited Batali — whom Buford, an enthusiastic amateur cook, admired but had never met — to a birthday dinner he was hosting for a mutual friend, Jay McInerney. As Heat opens, Batali arrives laden with Italian booze and a raw slab of pig lard he has cured himself; Buford awakens the next morning with a hangover and a mission: to become a kitchen slave at Babbo, the Batali crown jewel and the only three-star Italian restaurant in New York.

Buford's journey begins in January 2002 in the prep kitchen, chopping carrots and boning duck. Given his age (late forties) and lack of experience, his colleagues at Babbo regard him initially as an interloper — which he is, in effect, showing up when he's not too busy being the fiction editor of the New Yorker, and taking a spot from a culinary school intern. It's all the more remarkable, therefore, that we find him two years later promoted to line cook, manning the grill and pasta stations, having quit his day job for the heat of one of the city's busiest kitchens. After proving himself at Babbo, Buford heads to Tuscany — as Batali did before him — and what started as a continuing-education course becomes a graduate degree program, as Buford learns pasta with Batali's own teacher and then apprentices himself to the world's most famous butcher.

Heat is a travelogue, a memoir of a very lucky (and well-connected) man's sojourn to find the roots of Italian cooking — and an outlet for his passion. It gives an insider's view of the kitchen; like Kitchen Confidential, it's a foodie's wet dream. But it's something more, too: Buford's focus is as much on the food and its origins as it is on the people who make it. In this sense, the book is also a manifesto: for slow food, for the old ways, and for dedication to a craft.

-Chris Lamb