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No Experience Necessary

The Culinary Odyssey of Chef Norman Van Aken

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No Experience Necessary

By: Norman Van Aken
Narrated by: Norman Van Aken
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About this listen

No Experience Necessary is Chef Norman Van Aken's joyride of a memoir. In it he spans twenty-plus years and nearly as many jobs - including the fateful job advertisement in the local paper for a short-order cook with "no experience necessary."

Long considered a culinary renegade and a pioneering chef, Van Aken is an American original who chopped and charred, sweated and seared his way to cooking stardom with no formal training, but with extra helpings of energy, creativity, and faith. After landing on the deceptively breezy shores of Key West, Van Aken faced hurricanes, economic downturns, and mercurial moneymen during the decades when a restaurant could open and close faster than you can type haute cuisine. From a graveyard shift grunt at an all-night barbeque joint to a James Beard-award finalist for best restaurant in America, Van Aken put his trusting heart, poetic soul, natural talent, and ever-expanding experience into every venture - and helped transform the American culinary landscape along the way.

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From early days and childhood friends, of travelling around, hitching his way, of falling for Key West, and wife to be, Janet and eventually realising that what he wanted to do was cook and his compulsion to bring out his own dishes, to successes and failures running restaurants he could call his own. Then this book abruptly ends just as it gets really interesting. Along the way are (sometimes crude, often funny) anecdotes about life in the kitchens and he whole is interspersed with recipes, each preceded by the retelling of the lines from the appropriate part of the story already given, an unnecessary and sometimes slightly confusing repetition.

Read by the author himself, fluent!y but with some very strange pronunciations, No Experience Necessary is an enjoyable but irritating read in need of both an editor and an ending. It can currently be downloaded for free through the Audible Plus programme. I kept waiting for the real story to begin.

"With a little help from.my friends."

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