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Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community, and the Meaning of Generosity
Maybe someday
46
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
13/100Critics
80/100Scholars
Author:
Priya Basil
Publisher:
Knopf Publishing Group
Date:
November 3, 2020
A meditation on food, family, identity, immigration, and, most of all, hospitality--at the table and beyond--that's part food memoir, part appeal for more authentic decency in our daily worlds, and in the world at large.
What The Reviewers Say
Reading this slender, rich exploration of what it means to cook for others is like pulling up a chair at the ideal dinner party. The food is mouth-watering – creamy curries, candied baobab seeds, fat slices of homemade pizza – but just as nourishing is the conversation, which embraces hospitality in its many guises, from the strained welcome received by Syrian refugees in the author’s adoptive Germany to the langar, a free meal served in Sikh temples.
Basil moves from childhood domesticity — Mumji, her own cute greediness, her mother’s precious kadhi — to wider public issues, interrogating each in the context of hospitality: democracy, climate change, immigration, religion, food waste and Brexit, to name a few.
For anyone who enjoyed the travelogues of Anthony Bourdain, Be My Guest is a deeper and weightier exposition of the themes he explored—starting with food and extending to the movements of governments, and the meaning of self and other—and Basil similarly shares the joys of both writing and eating.
In Be My Guest, Priya Basil offers a rich meditation on the nature of hospitality, inviting readers to question the relationship between host and guest and to examine the philosophical contradictions at play.
