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.

[Basil] moves quickly from the personal to the political. She observes that she will always be a guest in the sense of being an outsider, as a Brit born to an Indian Sikh family who grew up in Kenya, and a woman with brown skin who now lives in Berlin and holds German citizenship.

We are all guests in this world, from even before the moment of birth (gestation): so Basil has come to understand throughout her remarkable life, and details in this memoir.

In these short and sometimes meandering musings, in which the author enlists the wisdom of Plato, Kant, Hannah Arendt, Peter Singer, and other thinkers, Basil explores what it means to be a woman, an immigrant, a host, and a guest through the backdrop of food, specifically the Indian food that reflects her Sikh background.

Novelist Basil draws on memoir, storytelling, religion, politics, and philosophy in this delightful and ruminative culinary cultural study.