Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal is the November selection of the Left Coast Culinary Book Club. I have to say that I didn’t have high hopes for this book but it ended better than I had expected. The reason that I say that is because one of Stradal other works, The Lager Queens of New York was a book read by my wife’s other book club that also reads romance books with shirtless firemen and lumberjacks.

The story is a bit disjointed and it took most of the book to weave together. Each chapter has a culinary experience loosely happening with or around the main character Eva Thorvald. Some chapters she is the focus while others she just makes an appearance. I don’t think I have ever read a book that had the main character portrayed in this style.

Ultimately, this is a rags to riches story. Eva suffers personal tragedy and social trauma throughout her young life. As the chapters progress, so does her age and the book covers roughly 25 years in just over 300 pages. Many of the supporting characters vary from gritty to psychotic and the all the while Eva keeps on moving forward.

I was listening to a podcast recently about the structure of SEAL training. What the former instructor was saying was that the premise was pretty simple. It wasn’t necessarily what they testing but how. They wanted to wash out people that were going to give up when the circumstances were not fair. He said many people could handle the physical part, it was the seemingly ruthless and unwarranted punishment that they couldn’t take. I think that it is fair to say that Eva Thorvald is a SEAL of the culinary world.

The story was interesting because it wasn’t a feelgood one. There were self-absorbed, idiot chefs as well a characters getting addicted to pain pills. I found myself asking ‘what is going to be this fool’s malady’? Fortunately, we only had to put up with the bad characters for a chapter. The good ones seemed to make cameo appearances throughout the book.

My overall opinion of this book is really clouded by one thing and that was the over the top extravagance of Eva’s career and life as the book moves on. Honestly, I think that this book would have been better and more believable if they would have toned down her success a little. I will give an example, Eva hosted a dinner where all the diners had to repel down a cliff to get to the table.

Maybe I am just a fuddy duddy but this sounds like cheesy, Mission Impossible stuff. I realize that most people don’t buy into that, but it definitely kind of soured the book for me. I am already kind of on the fence with haute cuisine the ostentatious descriptions but add James Bond to it and it is too much.

I think that you will like this book if you like food and fantasy. I don’t mean the Game of Thrones kind but more like the Cinderella kind. It’s hard to tell if Eva is a exotic beauty or a sasquatch by the different character’s descriptions. I will say that after all of the heartache, it is nice to know that perseverance and humility is rewarded, even if it is unbelievable.

End Your Programming Routine: It’s nice to step away from cookbooks and ‘chef-y’ memoirs, even if they are not necessarily my cup of tea. I am willing to give Stradal another chance because of his approach to stories. I can’t say that I knew where this story was going based on the disjointedness of the book. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t like it.