Food talk, split families in novel’s mix
Brooklyn BookBeat
There’s a lot of tasty talk about food in “A Place at the Table” (Touchstone), a novel whose main characters have an affinity for the kitchen, often a source of refuge when they hunger for lost family affections.
For Bobby Banks, a young gay white man in flight from his Georgia home in 1981, a chef’s job in a legendary Manhattan restaurant puts him on his feet. That same restaurant, years earlier, had played a similar role for Alice Stone, a black woman who made it famous after she left rural North Carolina to escape the abuses of Jim Crow.
In Bobby and Alice, author Susan Rebecca White pays fictional homage to Edna Lewis, a black woman whose Cafe Nicholson became a salon for Manhattan literati after World War II, and Scott Peacock, a gay white Southern chef nearly 50 years her junior. The two real-life luminaries in the culinary world became close friends and co-chefs called by some “the odd couple of Southern Cooking.”