Long ago, a bright eyed grad student thought she could juggle both assigned readings and books for fun.

She was wrong.

Over a year later, I checked out the book My Place at the Table from the library and read it in one night. It was absolutely amazing.

My Place at the Table recounts the tales of Alec Lobrano as he takes on journalist positions in Paris, France. As he learns to navigate the city of his dreams, he explores the makings of food, eccentrics of celebrities, and dabbles in love. Throughout the novel, he flashes back to many experiences in his childhood that contributed to Alec becoming a man looking to come into his own.

From the most expensive restaurants, to local “hole in the walls,” Alec takes the reader on a journey of food while exploring his past and present. He invites to all-American summers as a child with a father he could not seem to please and a conflicted mother and a relationship that was not as it seemed. There were even brief detours through some of the darker places of humanity.

As someone who dreams of one day living in Paris as a writer, I cheered for Alec and enjoyed seeing him come into his own. This was a brutally honest book and I am glad I was able to make time to read it. I would recommend My Place at the Table to anyone who has a love for food, looking to take risks or is in search for a life of their own.

I love a food memoir! They are always so entertaining and immersive. This one especially gave me the exact experience I'm looking for when I read one-atmospheric and memorable.

I love a good food memoir and I enjoyed this one as much as Eat, Pray, Love and A Pig in Provence! I enjoyed reading his food descriptions as much as I enjoyed his journey. It was refreshing to read that he used a position in fashion to relocate to Paris and then created for himself the life and career he wanted.

His writing is as delectable as the food he describes. Travel, food, Paris, career and personal growth and realization...what's not to love?!! I highly recommend this read!

Thank you to NetGalley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the author for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher through netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This book is well written. This is an enjoyable memoir. I enjoyed how he described the food and tge surrounding areas from Paris, France to the United Kingdom. I would highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. It is in stores for $27.00 (USD).

Alexander Lobrano clearly is a formidable writer. His descriptions of his life in France over the years is impeccable, and you are left feeling as though you are right there. This is not a book to be taken lightly, but to be submersed in it for hours at a time. If that is what you are seeking, then you will not be disappointed. You will learn all about what it would have been like to live in Paris in the '80s and '90s and the glamorous (yet not always fun to be around) people he encountered. There is a list of restaurants at the back of the book.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this book.

A delightful book! This memoir by food writer Alexander Lobrano chronicles his time in Paris, eating, learning about food, and working his way up the career ladder of gastronomic journalism. The author is a fine storyteller, and the book is an easy, interesting, and charming read. Lobrano also tells of his numerous boyfriends, but these stories most definitely take a back seat to the food.

Highly recommended for those who enjoy good travel stories and for foodies.

Like it , just don't love it.

Enjoyed all the food descriptions , the behind the scenes and his experience living in Paris .

I think foodies would love this book .

I just reviewed My Place at the Table by Alexander Lobrano. #MyPlaceattheTable #NetGalley

Alec Lobrano is an American who grew up in the northeast. He knew at a young age that food was very important to him and enjoyed learning about it.

Not too long after college, Alec moved to Paris which had drawn him for years. His first in Paris was at Women’s Wear Daily in the menswear section even though he had no knowledge of the subject, nor did he care about it. He wanted to write about food. Slowly, he began getting assignments to visit cheesemakers, chefs, markets, and finally reviewing restaurants. Through the many people and chefs in the food industry, he learned about the origin of French food and how it all came together to make glorious dishes.

Alec meets extraordinary chefs who are willing to share their knowledge of the food and the areas of France that have the best. While some restaurant owners tried to intimidate Alec if his reviews weren’t to their satisfaction, he refused to give in and change his review to satisfy their egos.

I was drawn to and mesmerized by this book because I lived in Paris for six wonderful years and my passion was French food. It’s an experience where one never stops learning. You can find delicious dishes in the most out of the way places, in addition to insipid and overpriced dishes at big name restaurants. Learning to navigate the markets is a challenge and a joy. The food you find is the freshest anywhere. It is brought to market in the very early hours of the morning and set out for customers to select the very best. French cooking is not only an art but it is done with love.

His story of the nasty Portuguese concierge brings back memories. Ours was just mean too. I also enjoyed his chats with Ruth Reichel whom I followed online because her newsletters were so interesting. At the end of the book, readers will find a listing of restaurants in Paris that range from inexpensive to expensive. The author gives a brief synopsis of his favorite dishes at each, the address, and average price range. A totally delightful book. Don’t miss it.

Copy provided by NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

DID NOT FINISH AT 25%

This was absolutely not what I expected, nor was it really for me. I had expectations of one thing and when it became apparent that it was NOT the story I thought it was going to be, I realized I was not going to be able to finish it. I had such high hopes and am pretty disappointed.

Thank you to NetGalley, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My Place at the Table is the first memoir by self-described suburban Connecticut kid Alec Lobrano, who through his own grit and determination, transformed himself into one of France's most respected food critics.

Lobrano, who curiously seemed to care not a bit about fashion, used a fashion editor position to make his way to Paris, and pave his own way into the food world, by pushing the boundaries of his assignments; meanwhile, educating himself on French food, one meal at a time through a number of unexpected sources, his first landlady, neighbors, salty upstart and established chefs...

The book is a love letter not only to his adopted home of Paris (though perhaps not so much its high society crowd), but to the chefs and restaurant staff who tend to the serious business of food within in. While Lobrano treats us to many of the innovative and groundbreaking meals in bistros and fine dining establishments, many take root in generations-old family recipes, the simple country food of Normandy, Alsace, Archeche, the Basque region...

We also get a glimpse of his heartbreaking childhood, the son of an heir to the Drake Baking Company and an accountant, who desperately want to mold him into a more "normal" boy, all the while hiding a disturbing family secret. One strategy is to send him on a summer-long cross-country boys camping trip, where he ironically develops not only a taste for solitude, but for local cuisine beyond the white bread world of Connecticut.

This dysfunctional childhood full of odd characters gives us insight into his handling of encounters with such legendary figures as Yves St. Laurent, Helene de Rothschild, Giorgio Armani, though the most charming of all, a disastrous lunch brokered by his mother with Ruth Reichl. That his mother "acted like a puppy digging up a just-planted garden" bonds the two of them, leading to his most plum and coveted of assignments, for the now-dearly departed Gourmet magazine.

An unexpected bonus is the inclusion of Lobrano's Little Black Book, of his favorite Paris restaurants, ranging from "shockingly expensive' to the very humble. A quick Internet survey shows most of these are still at least operating on a takeaway basis, so will hopefully be there when we all eventually get there!

4.5 stars, rounded down. Entirely possible that over time and further reflection, it evolves into a 5...

Thank you to NetGalley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the author for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

It feels like it’s been way too long since I read a good foodoir, and especially one about France. They can be so pretentious for some reason. My Place at the Table, on the other hand, is such a delight.

Alexander Lobrano moved from London to Paris in the 1980s after landing a job as the menswear editor at the Paris office of Fairchild Publications, the publishers of Women’s Wear Daily and W. He didn’t actually know anything about menswear, nor did he speak French, but he seemed restless in London and not ready to move back to New York. In one of those almost impossibly lucky breaks that seemed to happen so often in careers in days gone by, he got the job and was off to Paris.

It was there, as he got to know the city by eating his way through it, that he began to realize how passionate he was about food, an interest that had been stamped out by his parents. Lobrano describes his childhood in Connecticut and his father’s scorn over his choice to write about a BLT for a school writing exercise, and their discouragements of his “imagination”. This was all happening while he began to perceive there was something different about himself; namely, that he’s gay, but also that he doesn’t quite feel at home in this setting and is curious about the rest of the world.

“I thought of writing about going to the beach because I loved the briny smell of the sea and the calm that came from sitting at the edge of a body of water I couldn’t see the end of. I hoped there was some unknown place beyond it where no one knew me, and that place would make me free.”

Lobrano is an absolutely lovely writer – warm and touching with an incredible eye and memory for detail (you can tell he’s been a journaler). He writes about the decidedly non-gourmet foods of his youth in a way that reminded me a bit of Nigel Slater’s Toast, and captured how well even lowbrow culinary culture shapes a person’s tastes and senses as well.

Strangely, I didn’t get on with the actual food writing set in France as well. It’s the style that turned me off the food writing genre initially until I discovered other variations, i.e.: it’s melodramatically descriptive, lots of nonsensical-sounding things like onions creating “drama” and flavors being sensual and things that focus more on heightened, lavish description but generally don’t say anything meaningful about food, in my humble far-from-culinary-expert opinion. But this isn’t the bulk of the book, and he more than makes up for these bits in how he writes about the importance of the food or chef in its corner of French culture — the countryside of Normandy, “peasant” cuisine, the gentle encouragements and explanations from his Parisian landlady, and his interviews with several chefs.

And the way he weaves food into his significant life stories more than makes up for it. It has so much heart and the kind of passion that comes from a long time loving something, and it’s wonderful to see his trajectory from Connecticut boy who knows he’s not in his element to renowned Parisian food critic. It has some very tough and emotional moments too — a hinted-at abuse in childhood comes to the fore in a very emotional moment later in his adult life — but he writes it so well and makes every story so meaningful. Just the best kind of memoir writing, really.

Even his many early stumbles as he was figuring out his place within the culinary scene are delightful — his interview with Androuet, the finest cheesemaker in Paris, conducted in French despite his ineptitude in the language at the time, is absolutely hilarious. Some details are left vague here and there, something that I think usually works in memoir and helps keep it from becoming overlong, but I loved his writing and storytelling so much that I wish more time had been spent on a few areas I still had questions about — his relationship with his parents seemed to end after two abrupt albeit telling meetings, some romantic relationships end equally abruptly and so on.

But on the whole it’s excellent, and never falls into the common trap of over-glorifying and idealizing Paris; rather, it celebrates exactly what was so special, instructive, and life-changing about his own experience as he allowed his personality to guide him and became at home in his own skin. He also makes quite interesting and, in my experience, accurate observations about expat life, the way natives of a country view their own emigrants, and some of the quirks of Parisian social culture.

Plus it’s delightfully star-studded: Ruth Reichl, Julia Child (this was one of my favorite scenes in the book, including the most fabulous Julia quote), an unusual interview with a drunken Patricia Highsmith, and a very sweet James Beard cameo (Lobrano would go on to be a James Beard Award winner).

He closes with his “little black book” of 30 of his favorite Paris restaurants, a valuable bookmark for a next visit. Definitely my favorite food memoir in a long time and a must-read for Francophiles.

A fascinating read for anyone who loves food!
While I had never heard of the author, I am always up for a good culinary read, especially one that involves travel or other countries. This book did not disappoint. Warm and engaging, the writer never comes off as pretentious as some food critics unfortunately do. He weaves an engaging tale that details how he faked his way into his career, using his love of food to ultimately position himself as a respected food journalist. His descriptions of not just the food he discovers, but also the people that he meets along his journey, draws readers in as if they were there beside him.
And speaking of food, be warned- this book will leave the reader hungry and seeking a meal such as the ones that Alexander enjoys himself. So many dishes are detailed in mouth watering terms that I wanted to run out and find something- anything- that could possibly measure up to those tantalizing delights. The writer is kind enough to end the book with a listing of his own favorite places (including price ranges) in France. Unfortunately, since the only traveling that this reader is currently doing is of the armchair variety, my hopes of being able to share in such a meal are slim to none, but a girl can dream, can't she?

I have followed Alexander Lobrano's food writing with great interest, a. because it is always so entertaining and b. because a lot of it takes place in Paris, a city I happen to love. Lobrano clearly knows and loves food, and is an indispensable source of restaurant knowledge for anyone visiting the City of Light. Having said that, I went into this book with really high hopes. On the face of it, a memoir about how an awkward young boy found himself through writing about food and living in Paris should be inspiring, entertaining fare. At times it was. At other times, I felt like Lobrano was building up to something interesting, and quite possibly some profound understanding about himself, that never came to pass. I also found it difficult to empathize with a man who in one breath writes about his good manners, and in the next offers a dishy takedown of...pretty much anyone in his path. But the descriptions of food and Paris were lovely. His passion for food and Paris are all too evident. I'm glad he found love. In the end, I really, really wanted to love this book, but I felt like it was more amuse bouche than main course. Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with an early copy in exchange for this honest review.

Thank you to the author, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I very much enjoyed this memoir of an awkward young boy from US suburbia who ends up as an influential food critic in Paris. It's not linear as such, there is some jumping back and forth, but following along with the author as he forges his own path, develops his taste buds and becomes adventurous in spite of himself is a great read.

Lobrano writes an amusing memoir about his love of food, travel, and writing. He discusses living in Paris and working as a writer. The many faces and places of Paris are revealed. I am not a fan of French cuisine. I read the book more for the cultural part and his observations of the people he encounters. My personal favorite is his cantankerous concierge whom he had to bribe to be nice to him, which failed. I think readers will enjoy his discussion of food, his own personal history, and the many flavors from the City of Lights.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this memoir. I specifically requested this book because of COVID; that is, I hoped it would be a lovely escape that would, if not mimic, at least give me a bit of the pleasure of travel back. It did and I would recommend it for that reason alone in these continually gloomy times.

COVID aside, this was a lovely little look into the life of someone who has successfully forged their own path. The novel is an easy read. Each chapter is a bite-sized look at a particular memory. The writing is fluid and descriptive while resting at the border of flowery. I enjoyed the easy pace, but it didn't provoke or demand. The impression is that the author wrote this as much for himself as for the reader. A position that commands respect from this particular reader for not coming across as arrogant or self-congratulatory. The addition of years would have helped greatly, though. It was difficult trying to figure out when things were occurring; I assumed the chapters followed a forward progression. The last few chapters deviate from this and include vague references to the year. A strange, but welcome departure.

Unlike most people, I am not in love with Paris. Paris is a place I neither like nor dislike; I've only been once many years ago. It's always been like the Popular Kids to me. Full of fashionable, but aloof people, who if they don't consciously consider themselves above you, their sub-conscious projects this through their mannerisms etc. The author does not agree. He falls in love with Paris early on in his life and moves there at the first opportunity. Seeing it through his eyes is a new look at a place. I don't think I'd go straight to "welcoming", but Mr. Lobrano gives the impression of an easy transition where he can finally become himself. This is always a good story for me. I love a happy ending and I may be a bit more enamored of Paris (and France as a whole) than I was before.

The narrative is also peppered with interesting people, who he describes so well I almost feel like I've met them. (It does not hurt that I can also google many of these famous names.) Yet, it's not the celebrities that I most enjoyed, but the chefs. He describes the chefs and their restaurants in detail. And then, of course, he describes the food.

Don't read while you're hungry. Some of the meals sound so good my mouth was watering. The recipes are delightful and described in full-length glory. It’s easy to imagine yourself sitting in these cafes with a glass of wine enjoying the simple company of a good meal. It’s escapism; pure and simple. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, if only I could visit Paris sometime soon; it’s definitely worth a new trip based on this memoir alone.

Read if you: Love foodie memoirs! This is not just Lobrano's memoir of living and working in France, but also a memoir of growing up as a shy gay kid with less-than-understanding parents.

Librarians/booksellers: Purchase for readers who love food memoirs or memoirs set in France.

Many thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

I don't always love to read about men but I'm glad I picked this up! A memoir about how this man went from being a gay child in Connecticut to becoming a super successful food critic in Paris. Loved the food chat, loved the Paris setting and loved reading about his life's evolution.

Paris-based food writer Alexander Lobrano's memoir is a delightful romp through the annals of food journalism as it was conducted in the 80s and 90s. Admittedly, food journalism has undergone drastic transformation in the past decade since the advent of internet that completely transformed the landscape once populated by expert restaurant critics with anyone with access to internet. Which is perhaps what makes the book so special because Lobrano trains a whimsical lens into his eventful career that enabled him to rub shoulders with legends of French gastronomy while living in Paris and present it to his American readers through numerous feature stories and profiles. (something unthinkable for a freelance food journalist to achieve in present day Paris) Lobrano landed a fashion magazine editor job in Paris in the mid 80s but his heart was always in food journalism. Years later, he quit his job and became a freelance writer based in Paris and continued an eventful career by reporting on France's cuisine, writing several guidebooks, holding the position of the Paris editor of the prestigious Gourmet magazine and winning (including James Beard) awards. A truly eventful career, filled with delectable details. True to what one would expect from a food journalist's memoir, the book's pages are filled with meal after meal of deliciousness Lobrano got to enjoy as he navigated his career in Paris. Excellent read.

A book foodies will-love.The author grew up in The us but move3 to and fell in love with Paris.Pull up a chair next to him at the table as he eats one delicious meal after another.He became a top food critic and met a wide variety of people including Princess Caroline.a fun interesting read a life story I really enjoyed,#netgalley#hmh