If you're looking for a light summer read, you could do worse than Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef
. Mones has written about Chinese food for . Mones has written about Chinese food for Gourmet magazine for the last couple of years, and this book serves as a vehicle for her to lavishly explain and illustrate a cuisine she clearly loves. The story and the human characters are fine, but not much more than functional. Rather, they're just present enough to enable the book's actual protagonists, Chinese culture and cuisine. And those characters are fabulously interesting and richly drawn. Now I really, really want to go to China. The book will also leave you incredibly hungry for real Chinese food, and so you may want to pick up Fuschia Dunlop's Land of Plenty
as well. as well.
