The Sorcerer

Around twenty-five years ago, thanks to a book entitled Kitchen Confidential, the world discovered Anthony Bourdain, a former heroin addict from New York who wrote like Jack Kerouac and gave an unfiltered account of everything that went on behind the doors of Manhattan’s restaurant kitchens. Thirteen-hour shifts, oysters to shuck, dishes to wash, sharp knives, drugs, sex, alcohol, military-style hierarchies and an overwhelming amount of testosterone. Bourdain transformed a profession that had until then been largely invisible into an epic populated by pirates, misfits, adventurers and petty criminals redeemed by their culinary talent. At the same time, Alexander Cammas, a French journalist exasperated by the solemnity of haute cuisine, its rituals, hierarchies and the conservatism of gastronomic guides, invented Le Fooding, an alternative guide that helped create a new gastronomic aesthetic comprising informal bistros, tattooed chefs, unkempt beards, electronic music, designers, photographers, conceptual dishes and waiters without ties. Chefs began to resemble members of an indie band, and restaurants moved into lofts, industrial warehouses and venues where concerts had been held until recently. Then came The Bear, the TV series that transformed the kitchen into a psychoanalytic session, where the chef is no longer Bourdain’s pirate nor Cammas’s heavily tattooed rebel, but a perfectionist on the brink of a mental breakdown, surrounded by a team seeking family, identity and a reason for living through their work. Daniele Rielli’s latest novel, Lo Stregone, fits perfectly into this narrative, taking the mythology of the chef to its extreme conclusions. Francesco Minervini, head chef at the two-Michelin-starred Bìos, is a chef revered as a visionary and feared as a cult leader. However, the night that decides the restaurant’s fate will not be recounted by him but by his kitchen team, through a mosaic of voices comprising his partner-manager, the head waitress, the alcoholic sommelier and even the kitchen boy. Meanwhile, in the dining room, there are those who spend exorbitant sums simply ‘to have an experience’, those who photograph their dishes before even tasting them, and those who find themselves discussing existential issues between courses. This is the paradox that Rielli depicts with fierce irony in this ensemble novel, where one group exhausts itself to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience, whilst the other is too busy recounting it to actually live it. 

The Sorcerer

Daniele Rielli

Mondadori, 192 pp., 19 euros