I closed the cover on Pino Luongo's Dirty Dishes: A Restaurateur's Story of Passion, Pain, and Pasta (buy at Amazon) about two weeks ago, and found myself at a loss. It felt wrong for me to review this book, since I've never been to one of Luongo's restaurants, or for that matter don't have any preconceived notions of what the New York food scene was like in the 80s and 90s. I worried that I wouldn't give Luongo his due.

That worry, it turns out, is a testament to Luongo (and Andrew Friedman, who co-authors). Dressed as it is in culinary finery, the book is, I suppose, subject to my usual reviewing tenets. The most important of these is that a gastronomic book should be capable of transporting the reader to a time or place that they otherwise might not have access to. The problem is that, as Pino's title implies, in his book there is dirt to be dished behind a public persona I knew nothing about. I was concerned that, without any additional context, I would buy his version of events without question.

In the end, although I know Luongo — an American Dream, "let my work speak for itself" kind of guy — would probably call bullshit on someone like me reviewing his book, the important thing is that I finished this book knowing that about him. This dilemma of authenticity makes a nice parallel to his restaurants, actually. Luongo aimed to introduce late 20th century New Yorkers to a new type of Italian: authentic Tuscan. Or at least, that was the goal, since most New Yorkers didn't know Tuscan from Adam.

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