| Tom Fitzmorris's Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans, the City Where Food Is Almost Everything |  | Author: Tom Fitzmorris
Publisher: Stewart, Tabori & Chang
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $13.52
as of 9/9/2010 10:37 PDT details
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 550,707
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 1584798017
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5976335
EAN: 9781584798019
ASIN: 1584798017
Publication Date: May 1, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Tom Fitzmorris covers the New Orleans food scene like powdered sugar covers a beignet. For more than thirty-five years he’s written a weekly restaurant review, but he’s best known for a long-running, daily radio talk show devoted to New Orleans restaurants and cooking.
In Tom Fitzmorris's Hungry Town, Fitzmorris movingly describes the disappearance of New Orleans’s food culture in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and its triumphant comeback—an essential element in the city’s recovery. He leads up to it with a recent history of New Orleans dining before the hurricane, from the Creole craze of the 1980s to the opening of restaurants by big-name chefs like Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. Fitzmorris’s coverage of the heroic return of the city’s chefs after Katrina highlights the importance of local cooking traditions to a community. The book includes recipes for some of the dishes mentioned in the story, and numerous sidebars informed by Fitzmorris’s long career writing about this delicious city.
“New Orleanians are passionate about a lot of things, especially food! Nobody understands this better than Tom Fitzmorris. In Hungry Town, Tom gives readers insight into this amazing and one-of-a-kind city, and shows how food and the restaurant industry helped the city to survive and thrive after Katrina.”
— EMERIL LAGASSE, chef, restaurateur, and TV host
“No city restaurant critic in U.S. history has written more, eaten more, or knows more of their cuisine than Tom Fitzmorris.”
— JAMES CARVILLE, political commentator, New Orleanian, and food enthusiast
“A delicious read, part autobiographical, with wonderful recipes and a comprehensive restaurant history. This is a great tribute to the indomitable spirit of the New Orleans restaurant community, which brought our city back from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Hungry Town is a must for both New Orleanians and lovers of New Orleans food.”
— ANNE GOOCH, Galatoire’s Restaurant and New Orleans Wine and Food Experience co-founder
“This book is a must-have for any New Orleanian or anyone traveling to New Orleans. It’s full of the juicy tidbits that you can’t find anywhere else. His prose will leave you salivating after every chapter. What a delicious read!”
— JOHN BESH, Besh Restaurant Group chef/owner
“From his cat-bird seat, Tom Fitzmorris shares with us the family feuds, delicious tidbits, and vicious bites that comprise the New Orleans food scene of the late twentieth century. Hungry Town is the Tom-tell-all we’ve all been waiting for!”
— POPPY TOOKER, Slow Food New Orleans founder and food activist
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
 Serving up the skinny on New Orleans food April 16, 2010
Pamela Robinson (Long Island)
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
Writer and food maven Tom Fitzmorris calls on his storehouse of knowledge about his New Orleans and its romance with good food to produce the informative and highly readable "Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans, the City Where Food Is Almost Everything."
Fitzmorris has been writing about food and his city since college days, arriving on the scene in the 1970s, just ahead of the Cajun food craze and the launch of such celebrity chefs as Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. He has, over time, written books, blogs, newsletters, newspaper columns and, above all, led a food-focused radio show. He relates the changing favorites and old traditions of New Orleans, where good food is assumed, the shift to different ways of preparing old favorites that began in the 1980s and onward. Included in the book are several recipes for those who like Oysters Rockefeller, grillades and grits, corn Macquechoux, rootbeer--glazed ham and many other local delights. His reporting on food naturally includes his own career and family, since they seem completely entwined.
However, not surprisingly, everything changed with the arrival of Katrina in 2005. He and his family evacuated but he soon returned, drawn back by his attachment to the city and questions from others about the state of the restaurant trade. He soon found a handful of restaurants open, some serving the hungry who had never left, others feeding the troops and emergency workers looking for something better than MRE's. Here he recounts the charitable work of Prudhomme and the owner of Drago's restaurant, both of whom fed countless thousands shortly after the storm.
And he tells the stories of restaurant workers who were lost to the storm or left to escape to better lives, of famous sites that simply couldn't reopen and the arrival of new or neighborhood restaurants, as well as the French Quarter places that hung on throughout the tragedy.
The stories are quite moving, even if you don't quite buy his premise that food saved New Orleans, kept it going through its disaster and sparked a revival.
The stories he tells are amusing, sad, honest snapshots of life in a great American city nearly brought to ruin but gradually coming back, though diminished. This is an excellent work for sociologists, historians, and, of course, anyone who loves food.
Tom FitzMorris' Hungry Town May 18, 2010
Mary Katherine Aldin (Hollywood, CA)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Bought it on amazon as soon as I heard it was out. I read it immediately and loved it!
It's got enough of the author in it to have a voice and a personality, but is not just "all about him" and what he went through. He really pulls off the complicated task of bringing together the "food stories" of everyone in post-Katrina New Orleans, touching on the restaurants, the customers, the chefs, the servers, and yes, the writers and broadcasters who have New Orleans food as their center. I hope this book sees reviews and sales outside New Orleans; it's a different kind of history of how Katrina affected the Crescent City, and a good one.
When (not if) it goes into a second edition, they should add a companion CD of New Orleans "food songs." There are plenty to choose from!
Done it again! April 23, 2010
Charles Tuna (United States)
6 out of 11 found this review helpful
A loving picture of New Orleans' culinary scene by one of the city's most enthusiastic supporters of good times and great food. The recipes are incredible, simple to follow and extremely well written. We'd expect nothing less from Fitzmorris.
Live to eat May 3, 2010
Sheila Crossley
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
The saying goes: We live to eat, not eat to live. It is certainly true. Good food is an understatement but it's more than that, it's the core of their everyday life. It's healing, it's friendship, it's community. I had tears in my eyes reading this book because I have experienced it.
 Excerpted from my July 2010 review in The National Barbecue News July 28, 2010
Doug Mosley (Monroe, LA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Being a critic, I have a soft spot in my heart for others of this trade who go about what they do in a fair and honest manner. That's what you owe to your readers as well as the ones whom you are critiquing. Tom Fitzmorris has long been a food critic in New Orleans. He's worked across mediums, penning his reviews in print and hosting a daily radio show. Fitzmorris has been a Crescent City fixture for so long that he is the perfect choice to assemble a history of the city's food. And that's what he has done in "Tom Fitzmorris's Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans, The City Where Food Is Almost Everything" ($24.95, Stewart Tabori & Chang, 224 pp.).
Fitzmorris had a front-row seat for the rise of the New Orleans star chefs, like Emeril Lagasse, Paul Prudhomme, Jamie Shannon, Susan Spicer and John Besh. He was there when Cajun and Creole cuisine swept the nation from it's NOLA base. And he was also there when Hurricane Katrina practically wiped the city off the map, shutting down every kitchen in the aftermath and scattering all the great chefs. He triumphantly concludes with New Orleans' rise from devastation and documents the new flavors that have risen. All summed up, it's a great read and one I'm sure you'll enjoy.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
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