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    No Experience Necessary: The Culinary Odyssey of Chef Norman Van Aken
    No Experience Necessary: The Culinary Odyssey of Chef Norman Van Aken
    No Experience Necessary: The Culinary Odyssey of Chef Norman Van Aken
    Audiobook12 hours

    No Experience Necessary: The Culinary Odyssey of Chef Norman Van Aken

    Written by Norman Van Aken

    Narrated by Norman Van Aken

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    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. In the irreverent tradition of Anthony Bourdain' s Kitchen Confidential, and populated by a rogues' gallery of colorful characters-- including movie stars, legendary musicians, and culinary giants Julia Child, Emeril Lagasse, and Charlie Trotter-- No Experience Necessary offers a uniquely personal, highly-entertaining under-the-tablecloth view of the high-stakes world of American cuisine told with wit, insight, and great affection by a natural storyteller.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateDec 7, 2013
    ISBN9781470379681
    No Experience Necessary: The Culinary Odyssey of Chef Norman Van Aken

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    Reviews for No Experience Necessary

    3/5

    27 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I love reading of adventures in the world of chef's, their path to where they are now. This was an adventure, he had a wild and sometimes crazy path to success. Unfortunately, it was also riddled with many rambling stories that really had little to do with his career path. I did enjoy the story, it just needed some trimming. I found the ending rough, well it just stopped so I expect to see book two following soon.
      If you like to read about people who came up from the bottom this is a good book. It has some real raw moments, some funny light ones, and a few that should have been dropped.
    • 2/5
      A very decent read, but, frankly, I felt like it was written for chefs and others in the restaurant industry, and not for those outside of it. Van Aken is very good with words, but I wasn't drawn into this book, and I don't think I would suggest it to others.
    • 3/5
      I love Anthony Bourdain and when I saw that he had written a quote on the cover for this book, I went in with high expectations. I was not disappointed. Norman Van Aken writes an engaging and entertaining story about his evolution from dishwasher to respected chef. His story involves name dropping, adversity, late night shenanigans, heartbreak, betrayal and redemption. I couldn't put it down. The only negative I saw was that most of the recipes he includes seem kind of...gross. I'd go to one of his restaurants for the chance of meeting him but based on the recipes included in the book, not for the food. I highly recommend this book for anyone considering a life in the food industry, Chef Aken shows the best and the worst of the industry. His honesty and gift for writing make this a must read.
    • 3/5
      This is a an excellent account of the growth of the modern restaurant and food market in American in the latter 20th century through the eyes of a witness and catalyst of that change. Van Aken was involved in many of the changes, markets, and movements that define modern American and global cuisine and his first hand accounts justify it as such. His self-taught ability, durability, and ability to survive in a tough business are amazing. His ideas and those that he trained literally made America a place where food could rival the established cuisines of the Europe and Asia. The narrative is colorful and lively if not bit disjointed and random. It adds to the charm though might pose a challenge to the casual reader. Chronology is another issue that gets light treatment as there is a great deal of jumping around and references that could leave one confused without paying attention. The description of the food world, kitchens, and how it feels to be involved in such a grand movement, however, make it all worth it and Van Aken deserves his place in the American pantheon of great chefs. A good read for fans of cooking, restaurants, or success stories.
    • 3/5
      Despite the awful cover -what were they thinking - and weak title - Bourdain's No Reservations kept popping in to my mind - this is a very engaging tale of one man's cooking odyssey that seems very honest to me. I like and have always liked Norm Van Aken. He is a fine chef and here he recounts how he evolved from almost nothing to almost everything. Perhaps a little too much Trotter here but hey -that's the story. Emeril comes off cool and I thought the whole thing well-written. The basic thing that seeps through is that he is smart and not a smartaleck. I think I will book a flight to Florida.
    • 3/5
      I received this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.In this book, Norman Van Aken recounts his early days as a chef working mostly in Key West, FL and in the midwest. It covers an interesting period in food history (?), the period when New American cuisine started to develop. While an interesting walk through the early days of Chef Van Aken's career, I was most interested in the portraits he painted through his descriptions of some of the people he worked with as he bounced from kitchen to kitchen. It seems the restaurant world is always made up of interesting characters from all walks of life, and this is the part of the book I found most satisfying.It's an interesting read if someone is into reading culinary memoirs, but not the best of the genre.
    • 3/5
      This is a charming odyssey of a young man growing into a restauranteur who gained some fame combining classical cuisine with carribean and latin American touches. A style now called 'Fusion'. Mr. Van Aken is a believer in using the finest local ingredients a la Alice Waters, and spicing them up with latin touches.The book follows him from his early beginnings as a young cook who marries his childhood sweetheart to the present where he is a bit of an eminence grise for having mentored Charlie Trotter. He has worked from California to Florida and some places in between and has written several cookbooks. . He is best known for his Florida inspired fusion recipes like 'Rhum and Pepper Painted Fish with Mango Habanero Mojo'.I think he started out wanting to do pure simple food but got more and more creative and complex. Not having tasted his work, I can't tell if I would like it or not, but I find the recipes in the book too complex to attempt. It was fun to read the story of young boy falling in love with cooking (besides his childhood sweetheart) and becoming buddies with the likes of Charlie Trotter and Emeril Lagasse. This book is sort of Huck Finn meets Julia Child. It was a fun read but I leave it to the more adventurous to cook from it.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to like this book a whole lot more than I did and actually had a hard time finishing it. Mr. Van Aken's story is pretty interesting, mostly regarding the people and places he happened upon and how that shaped his "fusion" style of cooking. While he credits himself with creating that style of cooking, really, it was going on all over the country, as America is certainly a melting pot of so many cultures and cuisines - especially here in Chicago. My biggest problem with the book was the sophomoric, teenage boy kind of writing, everything from the hotness (including breast size) of the waitress (full blown sexual harassment at times) and fellow chefs, dropping f-bombs and "hip guy" speak every other page or so, to all the glorification of drinking and drugs. I don't know if that was supposed to make me feel he was an average Joe, cool guy, or what, but it was really rather insulting at the end of the day. It was hard, at times, to even like the author. Anyway, the cooking and food really is where the book shines. I loved hearing about all the (unsung) cooks, chefs and food lovers all over Florida, Illinois and across the country. Although the book is incredibly meat heavy, some of the recipes seemed worth trying. The cook books and references he cites are some real undiscovered gems.
    • 2/5
      I have read many books written by chefs and food critics and have generally found them very interesting, well-written, and worthwhile. I cannot say the same about NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY by Norman Van Aken. I completed only three chapters, then skipped ahead several times to see if I would be able to finish it. Final decision: No.The prologue was a delightful story about how he worked with Emeril Lagasse to conceive, prepare, and serve the first course at a birthday dinner for Julia Child. The turn around time was three minutes so they waited until they got word that the speeches had ended so they could begin to cook the shrimp. As they raced with the dish, they got word that another speech had begun and the shrimp could not cook any longer without being ruined.Van Aken came to his culinary career by an unusual route. He roamed the country a lot and worked many low-paying jobs, such as a carnival employee and hot tar roofer. Along the way he lived with and/or traveled with a couple close friends, including Charlie Trotter. The book includes twenty recipes, many of which seem like something I would like to try. He provides a lot of honest detail about his lifestyle and work and readers can really picture what is happening. Unfortunately, from my perspective, he drops the f-bomb on almost every page. I may be old-fashioned, but I found it very distracting, offensive and insulting. I tried ignoring it at first but after the first couple of times, I decided it served no useful purpose and should have been omitted even if he thought it added realism. There are better ways to do that.If there is a second edition without that element, I’ll consider rereading it.I got this book as an early reviewer from LibraryThing.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to like NO Experience Necessary a lot more than I did. It was definitely fun - chock full of stories and recipes. The book feels like you're hanging out on a bar stool listening to Mr. Van Aken tells stories on a long summer night and this is a plus, but much of the book rambles about and many tales seem somewhat superfluous to Mr. Van Aken's journey with food. Maybe my problem with the book is related to my problem with much of the New American cooking so popular in the eighties and nineties with its over-reliance on Southwestern flavors. Much of this cooking trend feels like jalapenos added to everything (cheese bread - check, chicken stew - check, rice - check, pasties - check) and, while I love Southwestern flavors and chiles I much prefer the exploration of local foodways filtered through various personal sensibilities and New American cooking just never hit the right note for me. While it's interesting read the stories of Mr. Van Aken's journey up the line to chef and interesting to read about the business side of things as he opens restaurants with various partners and they fail for various reasons, worst of all is that the memoir stops abruptly - leaving out the opening of Norman's, Mr. Van Aken's eponymous restaurant, and all of the events that have led to his current success. All flaws aside I enjoyed the story and was particularly touched by his friendship with Charlie Trotter, a protege and food legend whose recent death was a shock to the culinary world.