Gabrielle Hamilton. Photo: Melissa Hamilton

Gabrielle Hamilton can write, there's no doubt about that. Craft infuses her recent bestseller, peppered as it is with references to both body and kitchen fluids.

Still, this writer was reluctant to read the memoir of this reluctant chef. When a book like Blood, Bones & Butter gets so much advance praise it's hard to believe it can live up to the hype.

Let's review, shall we? There was the excerpt in The New Yorker, a New York Times profile and laudatory reviews from the paper of record by Michiko Kakutani and Frank Bruni, along with glowing accounts in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Of course, the womens' glossies weighed in with pleasure, as did the blogosphere, including the Times (again), 5 Second Rule, and Bay Area Bites.

Top chefs chimed in too: Her book boasts bubbly blurbs from Bourdain, Batali, and Boulud.

Curious to find out what all the fuss was about, this reporter went to hear Hamilton speak at Omnivore Books in March, when she swung through town on book tour, and again last Thursday, when she appeared on stage in conversation with Kim Severson as part of the City Arts & Lecture series. Oh, and in between this reporter devoured her almost 300-page coming-of-age story.

The book is an indisputable page turner, but let's dispose of one major beef up front: The last section -- "Butter" -- feels rushed and not ready for prime time, in large part because the central concern -- the unraveling of her lonely marriage -- was not resolved in real time. No matter, the publisher wanted that memoir hitting the shelves pronto and mass marketing waits for no one. (Hamilton said Thursday that she's since addressed the marriage matter -- in life and on the page in an epilogue for the paperback edition, available in January.)

Clearly, the woman has a talent with pots and pens. The owner of Prune, a wildly popular little bistro in Manhattan's East Village, (the restaurant's title comes from a childhood nickname), Hamilton recently won a James Beard Award for best New York City chef after receiving nominations for the coveted title three years running. (Though some grumbled that the gal who serves Triscuits and canned sardines at the bar won more for what she represents than what she cooks.) She's written about the chef's life for Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, and Saveur, where her sister Melissa Hamilton was an editor, and appeared in six volumes of Best Food Writing.

Hamilton has worked hard and overcome obstacles to get to the top of her game, in two creative fields no less. She survived a largely feral childhood followed by a drug-fueled, unsupervised adolescence, turned to cooking to find family, home, hope, structure, and salvation and wound up, on a whim, running a restaurant of her own.

She's not interested in glamorizing either pursuit. If anything she has a tendency to martyrdom: Hamilton recounts cleaning human excrement off the restaurant stoop and deposing of a dead rat riddled with maggots found on the back steps. She turns hundreds of eggs on the breakfast line, while major-league pregnant and, later, with babies clinging to her breast. Her autobiography, a decade in the making, is scribbled on brown paper between services, on subway rides, and while putting those babes to bed. There is never enough time or sleep.

Professionally, Hamilton is a big talent and a huge success. Her personal life, as she reveals in her book, is a bit messier. Estranged from her mother for decades, she identifies as lesbian but ditched the sisterhood for a clandestine affair with an Italian man she ends up marrying. He is the father of her two boys, though from the beginning of their coupling trouble is brewing. For starters, Hamilton seems more in love with his mother and summer visits to the Italian clan's compound than her actual husband.

These personal revelations would seem meaty subjects for seasoned interviewer Kim Severson in her City Arts & Lectures discussion with Hamilton. But Severson -- now the New York Times' Atlanta bureau chief who appears to keep her hand in the food beat and her heart in San Francisco -- was in a tricky situation. Just days before Hamilton landed in town the New York Post had dropped a bombshell about the celebrity chef's love life.

Of course, who Hamilton sleeps with is really nobody else's business, except that her memoir includes revelations about her adventures in the sack as well as an apron. And Hamilton talks a lot about the value of being honest and authentic in the kitchen and on the page. To top it off, the New York Post item on Hamilton was recycled in the local food media the day before her appearance.

Severson gave a nod to the matter early on in the chat: "I'm going to ask you the question on everyone's minds, [theatrical pause] How do you keep your skin so dewy?" That set the tone for an evening of mostly softballs from Severson, who made a running gag about not being "bitter" that Hamilton's memoir was a better read than her own, Spoon Fed.

The Times staffer did try some shock value, noting the book's unusual intimacy, which a friend described to Severson this way: "I feel like I know every fold in her vagina." But she quickly found herself in the role of comforting colleague, after an earthquake literally shook the subdued Hamilton, who looked like she wanted to bolt from the stage when things started rocking.

A few sips of wine later, however, Hamilton regained her composure and temporarily shut down Severson, as she meandered through her self-described cliched questions. Case in point: "What's the last taste you would want in your mouth before you die?" Surely not the first time Hamilton's fielded that query.

"I thought we were going to have an intelligent conversation about writing and you want to know if I keep lube in my bedside table," Hamilton scolded at one point. Note to Linda Hunt: Not all KQED subscribers may be amused by the repartee between these two, who wondered if any couple, regardless of orientation, can keep sex alive in a long-term relationship -- though, it must be said, the crowd at Herbst Theater ate it up.

During the audience Q&A fans gushed about how much they loved Hamilton's book, even if they hadn't finished it, and her restaurant, even if they hadn't eaten there yet. In such an environment, this reporter felt it would have been a hostile act to ask the writer-chef if she cared to comment about the recent allegations in the press. Instead, she opted for the more discreet email follow up to both Hamilton and Severson, neither of whom jumped at the opportunity to explain why the subject wasn't broached on stage.

Hardly surprising. Hamilton made it clear at her book signing at Omnivore that she's selective about what aspects of her private life the public get to know about through her writing. Her mantra: If it's not in there, it's not tellable -- readers don't get all of her. Fair enough.

It's this kind of contradiction -- the tell-all that keeps secrets -- that makes Hamilton such a fascinating creature. She's full of inconsistencies -- aren't we all? -- only hers are on display for all the world to see and hear. Hamilton often says she loathes being called "a female chef" and yet when TV came calling looking for just such a demographic, she jumped at the chance to take one for the team.

Similarly she thinks the term "food writer" is demeaning; she's simply a chef who is also a scribe and cooking is what allowed her to come to the party. Yet, when asked what readers can expect next from the literary writer she responds: A cookbook.

During the talk Hamilton mentions the moms at her sons' school, who she says look at her disdainfully as she drops off her kids. Her children eat poorly and often in the car on the way to school, she confesses. And yet, one can't help but get the impression that the 45-year-old looks down her nose at them. Severson counters that perhaps the other moms are intimidated or awed by the successful chef with the best-selling memoir but Hamilton dismisses this notion out of hand.

And the Beard Award is silly, Hamilton says, until she wins it, and then it's the most important culinary honor a chef can earn. Thankfully she has a sense of humor about all this flip-flopping.

One gets the sense that Hamilton doesn't give a hoot if you like her, agree with her opinions, or want to read her book. It's what makes her intriguing and may well be an essential part of why she's so talented on the page and in the kitchen. She's just doing her own thing and not seeking anyone else's praise or approval.

During the course of the 90-minute City Arts & Lectures dialogue she laments the fetishization of food (the cult of farmers' markets, home cooks with sous vide machines), discussions of gender issues in restaurant kitchens (snoozeville), and the plethora of social media around food culture. Reading about food online, she says, is like eating at McDonalds. "You end up feeling hungry, undernourished, tired, and full of self loathing."

She's also down on the rise of reality TV cooking shows, even though she's had her own turn in front of the camera. (She slayed Bobby Flay on "Iron Chef"). "It's starting to suck for all of us, since TV isn't about cooking it's about entertaining," says Hamilton. "It's impossible to be quiet or subtle with food on television because actual cooking is really quite dull and repetitive."

Plans for a movie based on the memoir are already in the works, Hamilton told fans Thursday. She jokes she'd like to see Robert Downey Jr. play her.

That seems about right. Hamilton has balls. And a muscularity to her convictions and craft that the actor could convey handsomely. Audiences with a taste for Hamilton's contrarian ways might just go for such gender-bending casting. Stay tuned.

Listen to the conversation between Gabrielle Hamilton and Kim Severson broadcast on KQED Sunday, November 27 at 1 p.m.

Radishes with butter and sea salt, grilled lamb sausages, smoky eggplant and flatbread: just the kind of snacks you might expect, ready to be paired with a glass of Champagne or an expertly made Negroni at the tiny bar of a French-inspired, chef-owned bistro like Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune in New York City. But wait, sardines? Canned? Served with Triscuits and mustard?

When I lived in New York, quirky little Prune was a favorite restaurant of mine. Dinners there were brightly lit but festive, and whole sunny Sunday afternoons could float by in the wake of their justifiably famous Bloody Marys. But every time I walked in, my brain snagged on those sardines. They'd been on the bar menu since the place opened, and they never budged. There had to be a story there.

And there is, but not the one you'd might expect. Hamilton, as she tells it in her memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, grew up during the early 70s in a sprawling, bohemian family in rural Pennsylvania, the Jersey border right across the river--five kids running wild, dad a set designer and scenic artist for trade shows and theaters, mom a perfectionist Frenchwoman who made her own cassoulet and served her bisteeya the proper Moroccan way, with olive-and-orange salad and sweet mint tea.

The book begins We threw a party (and what else, really, does the staff of a restaurant do every night?), describing in loving and vivid detail the lamb roast her father orchestrated in the meadow behind their house every summer, in a voice that's funny, sharp, and profane. Telling the story of the party, Hamilton brings her family and her adolescent world into focus, only to let us know, in passing, that she remembers this party and its preparations so well only because it was the last moment before everything fell apart.

By the time Hamilton was 12, her parents had split up, her mom fleeing to Vermont, her dad working on failed shows (Got Tu Go Disco!) and nearly broke. As she recalls it, she and her 17-year-old brother Simon were left, parentless and cashless, to their own devices. Dinner meant whatever she could scrounge from the garden and the remains of her mother's pantry.

I ate canned sardines and chewed through the spines and the silvery unpleasant skin until I finally realized how to skin and filet them gently with a paring knife, placing the meaty bodies on horribly stale Triscuit crackers with sliced shallots and mayonnaise. I washed lettuce from the garden in warm water so my hands wouldn't get cold and watched it wilt but ate it anyway.

Soon, at 13, she was walking to the tourist restaurants in town, talking her way into bussing jobs by claiming to be 16. She works as a busser, waitress, and eventually cook at a place "called, ironically, Mother's." Work, to her, means freedom. "No future graduate-level feminism seminar would ever come within a mile of the force of that first paycheck. The conviction was instant and forever: If I pay my own way, I go my own way."

And go her own way she does, to New York City in the crazy 80s, where she starts waitressing at The Lone Star Cafe, a hotter-than-hot urban-cowboy nightclub and restaurant. She turns 17 there, working a scam with the other waitresses and bartenders to pocket something like 90K in cash--almost all of it, she notes, quickly spent on drugs, especially cocaine, which fueled both frenetic hours on the job and equally frenzied nights out afterwards. She got busted, but gos lucky: a lawyer friend of her brother's finds out she's still a juvenile and works a deal, as long as she agrees to get out of New York City, fast, and enroll in college. Some more string-pulling ensues, and she ends up at Hampshire College, an earnestly progressive, no-grades liberal arts school in New England, where she lasts for all of five semesters before moving first back home and then back to New York City.

Here, the story starts skipping forward and back. The comfort of kitchens becomes the grind of a decade as a freelance catering-chef-for-hire, working grueling shifts for the big high-end catering companies feeding the city's nouveau high society. Years, it seems, go by in a fluorescent-lit blur of plastic-wrapped racks full of salmon pinwheels.

There are frank, Bourdain-like rants about the grossness of professional kitchens, about the interchangeability of the cooks, and how sheer stamina becomes the only thing she and her co-workers can brag of. There's a brief respite in the shape of a summer camp, where she cooks for several bucolic years, feeding, among others, the appreciative, food-smart young daughter of New York Times' writer Mark Bittman, and a bleak foray into a graduate writing program at the University of Michigan, which she longs for, then despises, and eventually makes her peace with, mostly thanks to another restaurant job where she cooks for cash and sanity, re-establishing her place in the world away from her jargon-spouting, comfortably privileged fellow writers.

Eventually, of course, we get to the real meat of the book: the surprisingly off-the-cuff way she starts Prune, her own restaurant, and gets it up and running. As any chef can tell you, owning and cooking at your own restaurant is a 25-hour-a-day job, and Hamilton has not only the restaurant but two kids. So, perhaps it's not surprising that the book feels more and more fragmented as it goes along. Here's Hamilton, undertaking the truly grisly job of clearing out the rotting remains of the space's previous tenant, a failed restaurant whose owners had split the year before without taking out so much as a bag of garbage.

Then, suddenly, here she is getting married to one of her male customers, an Italian doctor, after an obliquely described affair that splits up Hamilton and her longtime girlfriend. He needs the marriage for visa purposes, but their love affair is a real one--except that he pulls away almost the moment they head to Europe for their honeymoon. Yet they stay, nominally, together, having 2 sons but uniting only for a yearly trip to visit his family at their villa in Italy.

A long flashback to a solo backpacking trip through Europe and beyond explains the emotional back stories to much of the food on Hamilton's menus. Structurally, though, it feels shoehorned in. Hamilton is a smart and accomplished writer, but she seems exhausted or simply unwilling to reveal as much as a memoir demands, nor does she quite have a handle on the solid, novel-shaped arc and structure that the form requires at its best.

Engaging and observant, she zeros in on small details, such as how, due to blood-sugar issues based in "too many years of going all day without eating, that freakish thing about restaurant work," she desperately needs to have "some orange juice, iced Ovaltine, and a full quart of ice-cold Coca-Cola down my throat in seconds, and in that particular order" at least twice during every brunch shift (wherein, by the way, exactly "192 Thomas's English muffins" and "1440 eggs" are consumed). We learn all about crazies living upstairs, and how one complains about the music while another stands around bare-chested and gesticulating in front of the restaurant's windows. We get a meticulous description of the warm, perfectly waxy yellow potato that accompanied a ham sandwich she ate on a freezing, lonely day in a cafe in Amsterdam. But when it comes to the big questions, she sketches in the issues, then keeps her head down and her mouth shut.

Were this a novel, a reader might expect to eventually find out why such a tough and opinionated main character stays married for so long to a man she describes angrily as distant, impersonal, and disengaged. Why did this man pursue her so ardently, then cool off abruptly without letting her go? Previously a lesbian, does she miss her relationships with women? Why did she cut her supposedly adored mother completely out of her life for 20 years? Why all those soul-sucking years in catering?

And why, with all the other dirtier, tougher, more glamorous jobs out there, do we still long to devour the inside dish on a restaurant chef? Hamilton's not telling. But she sure knows how to throw a damn good party.

Listen to clips of Gabrielle Hamilton reading from the Blood, Bones, & Butter audiobook which she narrated herself:
Opening Prune (describes the first time seeing the Prune space and her decision
to open a restaurant, 6:02 run time)

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Female Chefs (about speaking to the students at CIA about the state of women in
the industry, 4:25 run time)

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Gabrielle Hamilton will be signing books at the Left Bank in Larkspur, followed by a four-course dinner. Tickets are $100/person and include dinner, wine, and a copy of the book. She will also be signing books at Camino in Oakland on Fri., Mar. 11, at 6pm, followed by dinner at 7pm. Tickets are $100/person and include cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, dinner, and wine. She will be doing a free reading at Omnivore Books in San Francisco on Sat., Mar. 12 at 3pm.

KQED The Writers' Block Interview: Q+A with Gabrielle Hamilton

When people tell me they're going to New York City I ask where they will dine. Then I make suggestions. Sometimes I'm even crazy enough to ask someone living there which restaurant is their favorite. People who love to eat get a pained expression on their face when they attempt to take in my queries. They tell me it's impossible to choose just one. While I can see their point, I disagree.

My favorite restaurant in New York City is Prune. It's on first street between first and second avenue, and it's so small that a lazy blink will guarantee completely missing it. Prune is Paris small, and if you need a lot of personal space, it’s not the place for you.

Gabrielle Hamilton is Prune's chef-owner. The first time I met her it struck me that she was unafraid of voicing strong opinions, but didn't take herself too seriously. Her food is soulful, clean, clear, straightforward, homey, and humorous. While many chefs speak a rhetoric the media adores, Ms. Hamilton's restaurant walks a talk unspoken, but felt down to your very toes, should you have all your senses open when you dine there.

Prune's tiny space presses disparate people against one another and the conviviality is sweaty and infectious. That close, familial feeling starts with the staff first, and many people who work at Prune were only going to stay there for a few weeks but are there year after year, still, when I make my pilgrimages.

Luckily for us, two Prune chef alums, Ginevra Iverson and Eric Korsh have recently migrated West to Sebastopol and opened Eloise, in fact. After getting ahold of the news on EaterSF some time ago, I knew I would make the drive, and who I would take. My friend DB said, after looking at the menu for the first time, "Yeah, but the problem is we're going to need to order everything on there. I will not be able to choose."

Luckily, DB and I are both famous eaters, and we didn't have to do much choosing last night, because we ordered all the appetizers except one and for that we substituted a Hudson Valley free-range foie gras torchon with Eloise garden grown peaches and pears.

What we ate, in order from extra ordinary to just great:

Chilled Tomato Soup, Heirloom Tomatoes, Mint & Chives; Mushroom Toast, Poached Egg, Black Truffle, Bordelaise; Roasted Bone Marrow, Parsley & Shallot Salad; The Foie Gras Special; Bibb Lettuce, Warm Feta, Scallion, Red Wine Vinaigrette; Puntarelle, Chopped Egg Vinaigrette, Candied Bacon; Octopus and White Anchovy Salad, String Beans, Fingerling Potatoes; Crispy Sweetbreads, Pickled Vegetables, Raisin-Mustard Vinaigrette.

Next time we’ll focus on entrees.

If we could have ordered one it would have been Ricotta and Chard Gnocchi, Brown Butter, Sage. But after eight dishes, in three courses, we were happy to get the dessert menus and call it a night well spent.

Eloise is aesthetically stunning. Seeing its understated sign on Gravenstein Highway South won't prepare you for a restaurant both elegant and comfy, country and city, understated and decorated, whimsical and clean, open and intimate. Upon entering you're greeted with small bar and a fabulous floor of Moroccan tiles. A number of vegetable gardens, currently in seasonal transition, flank the kitchen; and a wall blocking the old highway from the dining room's view is terraced with herbs and wildflowers.

If you can get to Eloise before night, it's one of the best restaurants to watch day turn to dusk and then thick inky blue sky. Sebastopol remains a mostly agricultural town and the air, especially as we Northern Californians gently enter autumn, is redolent of apples, grapes turning into wine, and cow pastures; sometimes all at once. Night skies are dense with stars when clear.

Eloise’s dessert menu is tiny compared to it's salty side. Three items were offered and Ginevra's special of rhubarb crepes and vanilla ice cream was offered verbally by our gracious waiter. Off the menu we ordered Sugared Doughnuts with Raspberry Jam, and the special. While I can appreciate offering simple, straightforward plates in the last course category, I found desserts lacking. I'm a tough customer, though, and I was glad not to see San Francisco's ubiquitous lowest-common-denominator pannacottas and molten chocolate cakes.

Cooking in and for New York City is a very different experience than that of Northern California. Chefs Iverson & Korsh have given birth to a bi-coastal restaurant, both in technique and inspiration, and my hope is their success makes way for other chefs inspired by farm-kitchens to journey West or East, depending, expanding our ideas about what ingredient-driven cuisine can be.

Eloise, at its nascent six weeks old, is doing a great job. And my belief is that it will only get better. As leaves turn, and fall arrives, Sebastopol explodes with the fruit it’s famous for: apples. And perhaps these chefs, inspired by Gabrielle Hamilton’s unique humor, carry with them a mischievous secret: they’ve moved from the Big Apple to seduce California’s apple county.

Restaurant Eloise
2295 Gravenstein Highway South
Sebastopol, California 95472
707. 823. 6387

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