In the Kitchen with Rosie or Hotel Bemelmans

In the Kitchen with Rosie: Oprah's Favorite Recipes

Author: Rosie Daley

With 50 recipes and 8 pages of full-color photographs by Micheal McLaughlin.

Publishers Weekly

This is a celebrity cookbook with a heart-healthy edge. Brief anecdotes by Oprah and recipe prefaces by Daley, her cook, may lure Oprah watchers--not only have they seen her weight loss, now they can taste the foods that presumably helped to make it possible. Others will find her style obvious: ``I have thrived on pasta,'' Oprah confides. ``I can eat it every day.'' Exclamation points abound: ``Forget iceberg!'' she exhorts in the introduction to salad recipes.``Experiment! . . . Delicious!'' Fortunately, Daley is a professional chef, trained at the Cal-A-Vie Spa, and her recipes are no mere fluff. Practical advice on preparations that add flavor while reducing fat reflect her spa experience, while suggestions for garnishes add visual interest. The numerous tips stretch the length of the book, too: just 50 recipes are featured in 134 pages. Typical of Daley's approach is the following paean to paella: ``In this beautiful dish jet-black mussels, pale gray clams, and vibrant red lobster tails lie on a bed of golden saffron rice, surrounded by chopped tomato and green peas, its flavor enhanced by the addition of squid rings and an assortment of peppers.'' Photos not seen by PW. 400,000 first printing; advertising. (May)

Library Journal

A cookbook from Oprah Winfrey's personal chef would no doubt be popular no matter what (proved here by the 200,000-copy first printing), but Daley in fact offers a number of zesty and creative recipes. Her professional background includes experience as a spa chef, and most of her dishes are sophisticated and elegant presentations-although there are also recipes for Un-Fried French Fries and Un-Fried Chicken. Many are highly spiced as well, substituting assertive flavor for fat. You'll probably need multiple copies.

Look this: Something to Talk About or Dishing Up Maine

Hotel Bemelmans

Author: Ludwig Bemelmans

"Ludwig Bemelmans was the original bad boy of the New York hotel/restaurant subculture" writes Anthony Bourdain, and with his reporter's eye for sensory detail and his keen wit, Bemelmans' humorous autobiographical tales of behind the scenes kitchen life at the Ritz in 1920s and 30s New York never fail to amuse and engage.

Proabaly Bemelmans' best work—and certainly his most famous essays—Hotel Bemelmans brilliantly evokes the kitchens, back passages, dining rooms, and banquet halls of Bemelmans' years at the Hotel Splendide—a thinly disguised stand-in for the Ritz. It's a strange, fabulous, and sometimes terrible universe populated by rogues, con-men, geniuses, craftsmen, lunatics, gypsies, tramps, and thieves—and it's all here in bitingly funny detail. Twenty-four of the tales are vintage Bemelmans, two have never before been published, and the lot is accompanied by 73 of Bemelmans' original, charming drawings.

Jonathan Yardley

Between 1938 and 1942 Bemelmans published four books about his life in hotels and restaurants -- Life Class, Small Beer, Hotel Splendide and I Love You, I Love You, I Love You -- all of which have been out of print for ages. Hotel Bemelmans is a greatest-hits selection of two dozen reminiscences culled from those books and previously uncollected material as well as a generous sample of his charming drawings … the best parts of the book are those in which Bemelmans writes about Mespoulets and the other mostly anonymous service people who are a lot more interesting than the Society they serve.— The Washington Post r

The New York Times - Paul Levy

In this elegantly illustrated new edition of Hotel Bemelmans, Bemelmans tells witty tales of a young Austrian immigrant's working life in the Hotel Splendide in Manhattan, a thinly disguised Ritz-Carlton.

Library Journal

Bemelmans's humorous sketches, released in 1946, offer a glimpse of upper-crust hotel and restaurant life in the 1920s through 1940s. This Overlook edition contains two recollections not included in the original. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.