Burn the Ice

Interesting but a little disjointed - it's a lot of snapshots of restaurants/chefs at various points in the last 15-20 years of the American food scene, some of which get more than one chapter and some of which we never return to. The short chapters on Tom Colicchio, Ree Drummond, and Guy Fieri are more like essays and were some of the standouts to me, especially the Guy Fieri one. The rest was interesting, but seemed to lack additional context to bring it all together - what changed in American culture, and how did the food and restaurants highlighted here reflect that? Was a switch flipped in 2004 and all of a sudden everyone wanted artisanal chicken nuggets? There's not much of that macro analysis here, but the micro deep dives into the stories of these chefs over time are interesting, especially the ones like Andre Prince Jeffries. The writing is fun and engaging but I wanted more from the book than it ended up being.