Chicago Reader Review By Mike Sula
In contrast to the perfectionist Achatz or Tramonto, who clawed to the top and stared in terror at the bottom, 55-year-old line cook Wayne Cohen is awfully pleased with himself. When the accomplished home cook and Maurice Lenell Cookie CEO found himself out of a white-collar job, he answered an ad for a line cook at a Lincoln Park German joint that sounds a lot like the late Prost. Through attrition, he quickly winds up head of the kitchen at the dysfunctional restaurant, and parlays the experience into stages at One SixtyBlue and Graham Elliot before landing on the line at Piccolo Sogno. That's really hard to do, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from Cohen's account. Written in first person, present tense, almost every chapter and section end with a telegraphed foreshadow: things are about to get weird, difficult, or controversial. They rarely do. Like Achatz, Cohen relates his challenges but there's never much of a sense of struggle, and one never really understands why things seem to come so easy for him. Sure, he's confident, with a positive attitude and a willingness to work hard, but lots of young culinary students and first-generation immigrants have those qualities too, and something tells me their experience is quite different from his. Still, as compared to Achatz's and Tramonto's books, this is the one most engaged with the trenches of kitchen warfare.
