Four Kitchens: Traveling the World with Lauren Shockey

Over the last few months of summer Lauren Shockey's Four Kitchens kept popping up on my radar- on my favorite blogs, in tweets, as giveaways, etc. Who was this young woman, just a couple years older than me, who I kept hearing about? Turns out Four Kitchens is the first book from a great new writer in our food-loving midst. Even though I had read a few posts about the book and some excerpts I wasn't sold on the book at first. Since there was no promise it'd be a homerun, not coming from a well-known and seasoned writer, I didn't buy Shockey's book right away. 

Luckily Lauren was one of the authors at the Freerange Reads event I attended at the beginning of September, throwing out a second line for me to catch. After she read us her stomach-churning experience eating dog meat in Hanoi I was effectively hooked and knew I would enjoy her book. But she didn't fully reel me in until last month's book launch party for Kathleen Flinn. At the September event I was able to hear the quality of her reading, but at the book party she was able to speak candidly to a small audience in a discussion about home cooking. After that I knew it would be worth my time to spend 300-pages or so with Lauren. So that was the night I bought the book and jumped right into it after finishing the books I had already queued up at the beginning of the month: Flinn's The Kitchen Counter Cooking School and Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me With Apples.

The comparison to Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and Four Kitchens has been made a few times, for valid reasons. Both are memoirs about women who travel alone to multiple countries with set goals in mind, eating along the way and ending with a final revelation. As Lauren said at the Flinn event her book is really just 'Eat, Eat, Eat, Eat- and wasn't that everyone's favorite part of the book anyway!?' Her journey to four countries and her work in four different restaurants is very interesting. As a chef-loving nation, getting into the kitchens anywhere is always a bit foreign and exciting for us. To get an insider's peek at one of the nation's most interesting kitchens, the molecularly focused wd~50, in addition to kitchens across the globe makes Shockey's story captivating to a broad audience; to lover's of Bourdain as much as those who loved reading (and watching) Gilbert's trek. 


After completing her degree at the French Culinary Institute and while working on a Masters in Food Studies at NYU Lauren comes up with her plan to be a stage (aka unpaid kitchen worker) in kitchens in New York (because that's where she's from), Hanoi (because Vietnamese cuisine fascinates her), Tel Aviv (because she is Jewish) and Paris (because of its gastronomic importance). 

Freerange Nonfiction Presented "A Night of Food Writing": Four Books You Should Check Out

This past Wednesday night I attended the Freerange Nonfiction Reading Series event at Pianos on the Lower East Side. Freerange Nonfiction is a group supporting and preserving the art of nonficition by nurturing writers and holding monthly readings. Recently they started doing more thematic readings and kicked off Wednesday with the theme of Food Writing. I heard about the event from Jonathan Dixon's Beaten Seared and Sauced Facebook page and decided to check it out. 

Four authors would be reading from their own books of food/drink-related nonfiction. Naturally, Jonathan Dixon was there to read from Beaten Seared and Sauced, Max Watman read from Chasing the White Dog, Lauren Shockey read from Four Kitchens, and Danyelle Freeman read from Try This. You know by now I loved Dixon's book but I have also been meaning to read Shockey's Four Kitchens. I had heard of Freeman's book but did not know much about it and I hadn't heard of Watman or his book before the event. I was looking forward to an evening of good readings and more titles to add to my constantly expanding list of books to read. That was just what I got. 


Being at Pianos I felt a bit out of place, not quite trendy or "hip" enough to be there in my all black ensemble. The crowd was small, mainly due to the never-ending rain we'd experienced all week, but they were happy to be there. Mira Ptacin got the evening going with an introduction to the evening and Freerange Nonfiction. Then Max Watman started the readings with an excerpt from Chasing the White Dog.

Watman's book is about his journey through the world of Moonshine. He read the chapter titled "Skillet's Place." From the moment he finished reading the first page of his selection, I could tell Watman was a great writer and that his book would be a joy to read. In this part of the book he's exploring the nip joints where moonshine is served and trying to see if he can go to one or at least acquire some moonshine that is sold in one. The descriptions he gives of how he imagines them, the realities he discovers, the people he meets (and the dialogue with them) and finally the moment he tastes some nip joint moonshine are vivid, entertaining and intriguing. You want to know more. Even though I had not heard of Watman before Wednesday night, he is on my radar now and I plan to read his book even though I'm not very interested in moonshine.