The Food of Love - Anthony Capella

When someone first reccommended I read this, as a bloke I turned my nose up ! Why on earth, I thought, would I want to read what is so obviously a chick book? Finally persuaded by the apparent descriptions of Rome which I visited last year on honeymoon and the lush details of the cooking involved in the novel (I work as a chef so have a passion for food), finally I decided to give this book a go as so many people I trust were saying how good it was. My friend, Sarah, says this is a very girly book and to some extent this is true. But for anyone who has visited Rome, the locations mentioned in the book will surely spirit you back there and bring back fond ...

Like Wayne Rooney (a five book deal – the mind boggles! He can’t string a sentence together without a liberal sprinkling of “Erm…y’know”!), Jamie Oliver is not someone whose opinion I would seek out on works of literature. So it will come as no surprise that it was not his words of recommendation on the cover of Anthony Capella’s “The Food of love” which persuaded me to purchase a copy. Whatever it was, the book sat for some time in a teeteringly dangerous skyscraper of books and was finally selected as the antidote to some rather foul weather that left me wanting a bit of escapism. “The Food of Love” is a modern re-working of an old classic – the Cyrano de ...

There were quite a few stickers and recommendations on the front of the book. “Richard & Judy’s summertime read 2005” said the first, but I’m not impressed by daytime television. “A fantastic story, you can almost taste the wonderful Italian food.” said Jamie Oliver, but that didn’t impress me either. Before you act on a recommendation you’ve got to respect the person who makes it. Then there was the bookshop’s “3 for 2”sticker. That convinced me I needn’t be quite so snobbish about my reading material. It’s another reworking of the classic Cyrano de Bergerac story: boy meets girl and asks his friend to help him win her heart. All goes well until the ...