Title:  Convictions of a Chef: Cooking for the Counterculture and the One Percent

Author: Evan Marcus-Rotman

Genre: Memoir

 

In Convictions of a Chef, Marcus-Rotman serves up a prison, culinary, and travel memoir liberally sprinkled with spiritual growth, self-reflection, and recreational drugs.

He has packed an extraordinary amount into his life so far. Although the book is separated into three parts, they flow and segue into each other comfortably, linked by underlying themes and Marcus-Rotman’s engaging, candid, and uncompromising style.

Part one immediately captures attention as the reader is taken back to June 1992 when twenty-three-year-old Marcus-Rotman, who has a five-year-old son, has just been sentenced to twelve and a half years for a minor drug offense.

This section details the inhumane conditions and the scandalously ingrained corruption, malfeasance, and bigotry that infected every level of the penal system. It makes for appalling yet compelling reading. This is exacerbated by the incurable, and often debilitating, auto-immune disorder psoriatic-arthritis which Marcus-Rotman developed during incarceration.

Naturally, there is retrospective anger in his tone as he describes his treatment during this time. However, interleaved with prison life and a developing interest in spirituality, he begins to relay his earlier years.

These paragraphs, aside from being incredibly interesting and gently touching upon painful family issues, provide contrast. They also supply poignant clarity to a personality that, although forthright, contains complex vulnerabilities and the reader becomes privy as to why these exist.

He writes with passion and honesty, dropping wonderfully amusing and authentic stories as he warmly reminisces about how his lifelong affinity to The Grateful Dead and their subculture began.

However, in later years, when he is employed as a private chef by The Dead, post-Jerry Garcia, it intriguingly reinforces the old adage that you shouldn’t meet your heroes.

Marcus-Rotman leaves prison with an overwhelming desire to be involved with cooking as a career, and after a brief restaurant spell, he enrolls in the California Culinary Academy.

His enthusiasm for, and writing about food, whether it be the preparation of gourmet cuisine with the finest ingredients or working in a Kosher kitchen at a nursing home, is infectious, accessible, and absorbing to readers, even those with little gastronomic interest.

His talent and work ethic open up boundless possibilities and he begins working on chartered yachts as a private chef for a diverse, wealthy collection of people. It’s immensely entertaining, if occasionally uncomfortable but Marcus-Rotman navigates the extravagant whims and often outrageous behavior of the super-rich with composure, improvisation, and quite a bit of partying.

The challenges he faces in producing all manner of dishes at all hours from often cramped, inhospitable working spaces are overcome with mind-boggling levels of craft and skill.

Between yachting work and private catering for music tours, he travels widely, sampling different cuisines and cultures, which he brings vibrantly to life. Marcus-Rotman has a talent for combining his culinary exploits with travel and effortlessly taking the reader with him.

Part three finds him, among other things, becoming an integral part of the surreal, organized chaos of the Burning Man festival, creating “gourmet performance barbecue artistry” in the brutal environment of the Black Rock desert.

If the private yacht fraternity contained some eccentrically excessive characters, they pale into insignificance beside those involved with Burning Man, and the reader is entertained with suitably decadent anecdotes.

A few photographs may have been a welcome complement and the last part becomes a touch repetitive and introspective toward the end, losing the breezy, driving rhythm of earlier. However, this gentler pace mirrors the author’s contemplative reflection.

Convictions of a Chef is a riotously good read. Highly enjoyable and difficult to put down, Marcus-Rotman is a natural storyteller who fascinates, provokes, and inspires in equal measure.

 

 

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