Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family

I thoroughly enjoyed Stuffed. I found it to be funny and clever and culturally informative. Don't let the title deceive you. The story does not center around a restaurant. In fact, Volk barely makes mention of the family establishment(s). Instead, Volk offers insight into memories of her family through foodstuff. A cookie. Meat. Soup. Chocolate. Each morsel of food is an opportunity to tell a small tale about a great-grandfather, her aunts, a sister. Probably the most profound chapter is the death of her father. The loss is profound, the love endless. The take-away from all this is love your family, warts and all.

In this book there area lot of names & it gets very hard to follow them at points. But I found this didn't matter - what their role in the family was wasn't the important part, it was the impact they had on the writer & her life. Volk has brought together key family tales & memories to paint a picture of the unit she grew up being a part of. Its the first book in a while to make me cry & really think about certain things in my own relationships, so while it may not have broken any literary ground, it touched me.

I thought this memoir would be about running a restaurant, full of funny and perhaps poignant anecdotes. But it's really about love and family relationships. The chapters on her father are especially touching and memorable. I'm very glad I read this work.

I read this for a research project. It's a very funny, sometimes painful, family memoir about several generations of Volk's family and their lives (mostly) in New York City. There are moments of real rhetorical brilliance here, but I think the book needs an edit too. A lot of family members are reduced to one-liners about their lives--this is funny, but I'd like to see more self-exploration by Volk here as she thinks about what her family means.

I find it odd that it is presented as a restaurant memoir. Ruth Reichel's excellent books are a lot more about food than this one is. Was the publisher trying to cash in on the food and restauarant memoir trend?

Volk's conclusion that you should love your family because they are yours is too pat show more for me. She is hurt by some of them many times. Anyone who comes from a violent or abusive background would see that, and wonder why she's so intent on love, despite everything. show less

I liked reading this book because it was about normal people over multiple generations, living their normal lives. It reminds you that everyone can be interesting, family is interesting, and sometimes it is hard to find out what makes people tick. This book kind of made me want to write about my own family. :)

However, at times the book was hard to read because it was written in a stream-of-consciousness style. Sometimes the writing suffered from lack of punctuation, and I think even a bit of editing in the format (large spaces or borders between stories) could have made it more clear. An inclusion of a family tree would have helped immensely in keeping track of who was who, and what everyone's names and nicknames were.

Since I've recently read Kitchen Confidential and Tender at the Bone, I thought I'd continue the food-related-memoir theme. But I'd say this book was less about life in the kitchen and more about life in a family, albeit an atypical one. Favorite part: "What she (her mom) wants for me is an even cleaner, thinner, happier life than she has. Mom made me and now she will make me better."

An enjoyable book about a New York City family who happens to be in the restaurant business. If you expect great stories about the life of a family and their restaurant, you will be disappointed. This vignettes only mention the restaurants in side notes. As little short stories about separate family members of the author it was quite a good read.