Reviews for Secret Recipes from the Corner Market

The average rating for Secret Recipes from the Corner Market based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-06-20 00:00:00 Robert Gilbert I really enjoyed this charming, funny book about travel and food. In the beginning he discusses how Americans travel and I was laughing so hard it almost hurt. He talks about long summer trips in the backseat of a car driving across America. It reminded me of my youth when we took 3 weeks every summer and travelled across America and Canada. We would be driving across the more boring parts of Texas and my dad would yell at us to get our noses out of our books and look at the "lovely" scenery he spent thousands of dollars for us to see. Really? Sagebrush? The book then evolves into a story of how he and his wife took their daughters around the world to experience food and culture, sort of. Part of the cultural hunt included finding the best hamburger in Paris and finding "baby foot" games in Italy. Baby foot is like the game Chandler and Joey played in "Friends." Although a little outdated now, it was written in the 1980's, it is still fun.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-16 00:00:00 Paul Harrison Calvin Trillin seems like someone you'd like as a friend. He's witty, full of good stories, and can appreciate the smaller pleasures the world has to offer. His writing suggests that it's better to be warm, amusing, and inclusive than edgy, preposterous, and bigger-than-life. This book ties together anecdotes and observations from various trips he, his wife Alice, and their girls had taken through the years. Local cuisine was often a focus. My own wife and I liked Alice's criterion for judging the gelati in Italy. (Crema is the perfect numeraire.) I also thought Trillin's tip for fitting in at a Paris café was useful. (It involved staring abjectly into space muttering, "Quelle ironique.") As a family, they enjoyed staying in the same out-of-the-way town in France every summer, indulging in local pleasures such as table-top foosball. Reading Travels with Alice we see the virtues of a more laid back approach to life, sans glitz. [Note to self: read Trillin's homage to Alice written after she passed away - sure to be affecting.]