Wrestling With Gravy: A Life, With Food is a combination memoir and recipe book, an idea that, though not completely new, is innovative enough. The volume, by former New York Times food columnist Jonathan Reynolds, is written in chapters, with each section focusing on a time in the writer’s life, complete with detailed reminiscing and a recipe or two. Reynolds’s résumé is as impressive as any I’ve ever seen: He is a screenwriter, a playwright, a food critic, an actor and now an author. He is also, in my humble opinion, a pompous blowhard and a serial ingrate, repeatedly repelling potential fans and readers by verbally dumping on his overworked parents and his accomplished colleagues and by offering backhanded complaints about some of our country’s greatest cultural icons. In a particularly grating section of text, he questions Francis Ford Coppola’s directorial choices whilst filming Apocalypse Now, insinuating that he would’ve done a much better job had he been allowed to complete the task.

Reynolds’s seems to think that though his opinion on such topics as food and acting are interesting, they are made much more interesting with the addition of painfully pre-planned name-dropping, ranging from an excruciatingly detailed description of a dinner at Coppola’s California home to an homage-laden trip down memory lane, focusing on the writer’s stint on David Frost’s television show. Reynolds repeatedly shoves his reader’s nose into what he seems to think should be the obvious fact that Frost, a mere blip in the radar of television history, was the greatest television personality who ever lived. Describing his departure to the (in my opinion, infinitely better) Dick Cavett show, Reynolds’s writes “…I moved from the Frost show to the Dick Cavett Show at ABC, selling my soul for network exposure and a raise to $400.”

Reynolds undoubtedly has a discriminating palate and a taste for good food, interesting company and the best that American culture has to offer. It is a disappointment, then, that this rendering of his life, with food, is ultimately unpalatable.