With the wit and pace of Anthony Bourdain, Italian chef and anthropologist Leonardo Lucarelli sketches the exhilarating life behind the closed doors of restaurants, and the unlikely work ethics of the kitchen

Even in Italy, star restaurants and celebrity chefs have become parts of the landscape. In reality, though, the restaurant industry is as tough, cutthroat, and unforgiving as anywhere else in the world --- sometimes colluding with the shady world of organized crime. From the deep underbelly of Italian cuisine comes the powerful voice of Leonardo Lucarelli, a professional chef who for almost two decades has been roaming Italy opening restaurants, training underpaid or just hopelessly incompetent sous-chefs, courting waitresses, riding high on drugs to work long hours, and cursing a culinary passion he inherited as a teenager from his hippie father.

In his debut, MINCEMEAT: The Education of an Italian Chef, Lucarelli teaches us that even among rogues and misfits, there is a moral code in the kitchen that must always be upheld above all else.