With the wit and pace of Anthony Bourdain, Italian chef and anthropologist Leonardo Lucarelli sketches the exhilarating life behind the closed doors of restaurants, and the unlikely work ethics of the kitchen.

In Italy, five-star restaurants and celebrity chefs may seem, on the surface, an integral part of the landscaping. In reality, the restaurant market is as hard, cutthroat, and unforgiving as somewhere else in the world–sometimes also colluding with the shady world of organized criminal offense. The powerful voice of Leonardo Lucarelli will take us through the underbelly of Italy’s cafe globe. Lucarelli is a professional chef who for almost two decades has been roaming Italy starting restaurants, schooling underpaid, occasionally hopelessly incompetent sous-chefs, courting waitresses, functioning long hours, riding high on medicines, and cursing a culinary passion he inherited as a teenager from his hippie father. In his debut, Mincemeat: THE TRAINING of an Italian Chef, Lucarelli teaches us that even among rogues and misfits, there’s a moral code in your kitchen that must, above all