It’s Meet the Author Monday! Each week we meet a new author and get to know a little about them, their writing process, publishing experience, and tips for other writers. Today we’re talking to Marisa Mangani, author of Mise en Place: Memoir of a Girl Chef.
About Marisa Mangani:
Marisa Mangani was born and raised in Hawaii. Finding her niche as a culinarian at a young age, she cooked her way to New Orleans and some of that city’s finest restaurants. A pivot put Marisa in the kitchen at World Expo ‘84, and from there she went on to manage high-volume international food concessions and restaurants at Expo ‘86 in Vancouver and Expo ‘88 in Brisbane. She is one of the eight featured chefs in Thrillist’s “Why 8 Top Chefs Quit the Kitchen.”
About Mise en Place:
Disadvantages be damned, I would be a chef someday, and if I had to run into the side of a house to do it, so be it.
Mise en Place is the rollicking memoir of Marisa Mangani, a talented chef who takes readers on her journey through the mostly men’s club of restaurant kitchens as she travels from Hawaii to Oregon, New Orleans, Canada, Australia, and Florida.
Along the way she shares raw revelations: abuse at the hands of her stepfather, stories of love and loss, the pain of stuttering, a great passion for cuisine, and the heady sensations associated with food and motherhood.
Not just a gifted chef, Mangani is a very accomplished writer who brings us into her world with brio and humor. She holds nothing back, as she describes her struggles for acceptance in her field and her stumbles and hard-won successes along the way.
Mise en Place will appeal to all who love food and restaurants, but it’s also a vivid travelogue of the places the author has lived. Mangani has a beautifully hedonistic take on food, wine, and life—and her intense descriptions bring readers front and center into her world as she tries to carve out a living.
Her details of the inner workings of restaurant kitchens are quite enlightening. If readers don’t already know how hard the hospitality business can be on anyone who works in it, not just chefs, but owners, managers, servers, and dishwashers, they will once they’ve walked in Mangani’s shoes.
Mise en Place is a bold, new memoir that readers will find hard to put down.