Knives and Spoons: A Chef’s Story of Kitchens, Addictions and Mayhem Author: Alasdair Gill ISBN-13: 978-1037401435Publisher: MacmillanGuideline Price: £20; 321ppAlasdair Gill, author of Knives and Spoons, his memoir of addiction and being a London chef, has two fathers – his actual dad, writer AA Gill, and Anthony Bourdain, whom Gill briefly meets and who hovers over these pages like a benevolently gruff papa. Both the older Gill and Bourdain – food-writing icons whose impacts have outlived them – wrote about their addictions. Talk about anxiety of influence. It’s a swift read, ordered like a tasting menu with each chapter titled after a dish. Gill’s zingers are fierce, his observations skewering. One boss is “the kind of kid who either shoots straight As at school or everything else in the building”. The students at Ireland’s revered Ballymaloe Cookery School are “young posh girls lost after a gap year; older Irish fellas in a tanking business; American spouses sent over here for a break. The one commonality,” he adds, “was some sort of crisis.” However, Bourdain’s legacy is hard to shake, and at times, the book veers perilously close to Kitchen Confidential. Gill’s chefs, despite #MeToo, are still macho, horny pirates. He praises unsung figures such as immigrant kitchen porters and rants about people who don’t eat veal or octopus. What distinguishes Knives and Spoons is its Englishness. Gill has a self-effacing schoolboy eagerness, such as when, as a blushing father-to-be, he catalogues his addiction history to a midwife. He pays significant attention to that UK obsession that is teeth – the mouth of a drug-user has “just three or four murky gnashers protruding”, a chef brushes his teeth with haemorrhoid cream. Meanwhile, Gill’s family’s attitude towards addiction is Brideshead-level in its stiff-upper-lip tact. AA Gill broaches his son’s drug habit while they pick figs in France. Gill’s mother, former home secretary Amber Rudd, sends him to Ballymaloe to dry out. His uncle Nick, a Michelin-starred chef patronised by Princess Di, hit rock bottom and vanished, but not without a polite farewell. “Please,” he said, “don’t look for me.” While it can be irritating how Gill sidesteps his privilege, his unironic love for his posh family lends his memoir tenderness. His mother, he writes, “still answered the phone like I was someone worth saving”. His legendarily abrasive father, for him, “was the person you wanted centre table at your dinner party ... incredibly calming, being under that wing.” Pastry-making was a love that Gill discovered later in life, and Knives and Spoons ends, not with one dessert chapter, but two. Despite the testosterone and bad behaviour, it is sweetness that gives this book its poignancy and pleasure. Mei Chin is a writer from New York City living in Dublin