“Can’t endorse this as a cookbook. After looking through the reviews below, I have to say that it doesn’t appear that many other people do either, mostly praising the photography or the other writing.
The positive I took away was a piece of advice, a guy saying he keeps a pancake recipe in his wallet because it comes in handy every so often and everyone has the stuff for scratch pancakes. Sound advice.
But while the advice is okay, the book, like the magazine that birthed it, seems obsessed with putting forth this sort of lifestyle. There’s a whole vibe to the thing where it feels like someone is whispering in your ear that these are the dishes men should cook. That cooking this way is part of the Esquire lifestyle. That you should hang onto that pancake recipe and you’ll be one step closer to that lifestyle where you’re hooking up with different girls all the time and may wake up at their houses, yet you make it classy somehow.
Well, I’m here to burst that bubble. Here are some shoes that they are suggesting I buy right now (5/25/2013):
For a measly $175 I can wear what appear to be small wicker baskets on my feet? Well, make sure to sign me up!
This is a classic Esquire move. They have normal suits that look good and cost somewhere in the low $5000’s, and then a pair of short shorts that are salmon-colored with a tiny blue squirrel emblem stitched on the upper thigh. They treat food the same way, making it overly-complicated for very little actual gain. The recipe for coca-cola fried chicken? Sounded sort of good to me, and I was willing to bite. It was heavy, oily, and greasy. And if you’re saying to yourself “Fried chicken is supposed to be like that” then I weep for you, friend, because you’ve never known true ecstasy.
There was another dish I tried, some kind of breakfast scramble that involved potato chips. I think the only reason I made it was because I looked at it and said, “There is no fucking way that’s good.” I was right, let me tell you. I threw out almost the entire thing. A full pan of food, in the trash. Is there anything worse than cooking a family-sized portion of something, and after all’s said and done your reaction is, “Well, fuck. Now I have to make something to EAT”?
It’s a decent read all right. But the recipes? Fuck that shit.”