Don't Try This at Home : Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Cooks and Chefs - Hardcover

Kim Witherspoon is a founding partner at Inkwell Management, a literary agency based in Manhattan, and the coeditor of How I Learned to Cook. She lives with her family in North Salem, New York. Andrew Friedman specializes in books and articles about food, restaurants, and kitchen culture. He has authored or coauthored more than a dozen cookbooks.

"In my long and checkered career I have been witness to, party to, and even singularly responsible for any number of screw-ups, missteps, and over-reaches. I am not Alain Ducasse. The focus of my career has not always been a relentless drive towards excellence. As a mostly journeyman chef, knocking around the restaurant business for twenty-eight years, I’ve witnessed some pretty ugly episodes of culinary disaster. I have seen an accidentally glass-laden breaded veal cutlet cause a customer to rise up in the middle of a crowded dining room and begin keening and screaming with pain as blood dribbled from his mouth. I’ve watched restaurants endure mid-dinner rush fires, floods rodent infiltration—as well as the more innocuous annoyances of used band-aids, tufts of hair, and industrial staples showing up in the Nicoise salad. Busboy stabbing busboy, customer beating up customer, waters duking it out on the dining room floor—I’ve seen it all. But never have a I seen such a shameful synergy of Truly Awful Things happen, and in such spectacular fashion, as on New Years Eve 1991, a date that surely deserves to live in New York restaurant infamy..."--Anthony Bourdain, "New Years Meltdown"

"After looking at the fries, the chef decided that I had cheated, making them the day before and stashing them in the walk-in. I assured him that I hadn’t cheated. In fact, I invited him to walk across the kitchen where he could see the evidence of freshness for himself: the spent potato peels, still in the garbage can. But he didn’t want to hear this. He so didn’t want to hear it that he call me a name he had never called me before: navvy. To this day, I’m not sure what it means. But when he called me that, a hush fell over the restaurant staff, as though Marco had just slapped me with his gloves and I was supposed to challenge him to a duel..." --Mario Batali, "The Last Straw"

"My chef and I were charged with making one dish that night: Smoked salmon served with a thin sliver of avocado terrine. To make the terrine, you prepared a béchamel, then folded in an avocado puree. The mixture was poured into a mold and a gelatinous liquid was poured over it. It was then refrigerated so the gelatin would set up and suspend the beautiful puree. My chef took the salmon for himself and assigned me the terrine. Eagerly, I went to get some gelatin from the supply room, but discovered that all they had was the powdered variety. Having only used sheet gelatin, I turned the package over to read the instructions. On the back of the box there were what I’m sure were very helpful tips, written in not one but three languages: German, French, and Italian. This was about the time when I realized that this wasn’t going to be my day..."--Marcus Samuelsson, ‘The Big Chill"