Gabriel Lightfoot is executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel. Despite the competing demands of an exuberantly multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own, Gabe has things under control.
Until, that is, a worker is found dead in the kitchen’s basement. It is a small death, a lonely death—but it leads to huge ruptures in Gabe’s life.
‘All the ingredients for a sizzling tale are present: a sudden death that may or may not be accidental. A middle-age chef on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Sexual obsession. An illicit affair. A nefarious plot involving human smuggling.’
Boston Globe
‘This is a book about what it means to live in the twenty-first century; what it means to be good in this world of moral and political quicksand…Monica Ali is on top form.’
Scotsman
‘The kitchen of the title is the Imperial Hotel in central London and Ali’s dazzling accounts of its manic goings-on make Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential seem as genteel as Fanny Cradock.’
Sunday Times