Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption by Ed Levine

Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption Reviews

• 
  Steve Peifer

  Those coming to this book hoping for a Calvin Trillin like journey of food will be sorely disappointed. It would be like going to see Barbra Streisand in concert, and the concert begins with the announcement that she has fallen in love with the harmonica and there will be absolutely no singing.
  
  Instead of a love letter to eating, this is a grim look at how hard it is to start a business and obtain funding. This book was such a downer I lost my appetite. The very few flashes of his love for food give way to a mountain of how depressing it was to build his business. You can’t help but like this guy but it’s pretty easy to hate the book.
• 
  Bookworm

  A man goes on a quest for pizza and redemption. I'm not all that familiar with Serious Eats (had no idea this was the guy behind it, although I had read stuff by J. Kenji López-Alt) but this sounded like a fun book with its fun cover. Food/foodie books are something I enjoy so I thought I was going to dive into one of those.
  
  It's actually Levine's backstory and how he came to creating Serious Eats. And I'll admit, his writing and earlier life was compelling to read. It was interesting to see how he had lost both parents by the age of 12 and had to navigate a world where he was placed in the care of people who meant well but were not really ready to take on such a responsibility. I felt a lot for Levine and think it's awesome how he came to this spot.
  
  But after that...the book gets kind of boring. I had been a little uneasy after reading the flap on how he really put so much to the test: his marriage, family, friendships, etc. to get SE going. I was happy to see he thanked his still-wife, who stuck him through thick and thin as well as his son along with a bunch of other people who appear in and out of the book.
  
  But the story of getting to SE was boring. I really wasn't interested in a "how I did it" business plan. I wanted more about the site itself or really about the pizza that's mentioned in the title (or any other food!) There are recipes but the food itself is not really part of the story and it was a little disappointing to see that once again, this was a marketing ploy.
  
  It's not the worst and I really did enjoy his "voice" as an author. I'll check out other books/writings by him but I'd probably give this a pass unless you're really interested in the nitty gritty of how Serious Eats began and how it got to where it is now.
• 
  Mindaugas Mozūras

  His strength is not in changing people or molding them into his image, it’s in being able to pull them in and slingshot them around at just the right trajectory to help them reach, in his words, onward and upward.
  
  I found Serious Eats through Kenji and his book The Food Lab (my review of it:
  https://codingfearlessly.com/book-rev...). I'm subscribed to Serious Eats' RSS feed and that way regularly receive new articles and recipes, which I consume for fun and practical reasons. When I found out that there'll be a book about Ed Levine's journey to create it - I was sure to read the story.
  
  I expected the story itself to be about food. But actually, the words on the cover describe the journey quite accurately - "a food lover's thrill ride through business". While the food-filled background was compelling, at its heart - it's a startup story.
  
  I liked the book and was mainly affected by the parts about Ed's struggle to keep and sustain the business. Rooting for him, it was not always easy to read through the hardships, but at all times it was enthralling.
• 
  Megan

  Where was Ed Levine's editor in all this mess? Honestly, most of the book was about securing/not securing funding for Serious Eats. Boring! And the dialogue was...hard to read. I really thought the book would be more about the people at Serious Eats, the food, etc. So if you like books about start-up websites that are constantly somehow on the verge of collapsing, this is the book for you.
• 
  Justine

  3.5 stars and rounding down because I don't think this is a book that will appeal to those who haven't followed the site for as long as I have. I've used Serious Eats as my go-to (and often my only) food and cooking resource for nearly as long as it's been running, so reading this book was like finding out the True Hollywood Story (TM) of people whose names have come to be so familiar to me, I almost feel like I know them.
  
  On the bright side, it's a great look into how Web 2.0 (I remember when that was the buzzword!) took forth and changed the way we consume media, as well as all of the business drama that took place behind the scenes. Luckily, we as readers were always oblivious to what was really going on. I appreciated the exposition of the author's upbringing, too, as I agreed with him that it really informed a lot of the business decisions he made.
  
  However, I'm docking stars because I didn't feel the book was necessarily well-written – it was a recounting of what happened, but it didn't feel like there was a real arc to the story. As a big food person, I appreciated all of the food tips, but the way the digressions were written into the book were often jarring and didn't work as well in prose as they would in a conversation. Go to [RESTAURANT] and you won't regret ordering [DISH]. More often than not, they came off as abrupt interruptions and asides, I said to [PERSON] at [RESTAURANT]. [DISH] is my favorite. See?
  
  All that said, I did enjoy this book, and read it quickly. I just don't think I'd recommend it to someone not familiar with the site; I didn't come away from it having learned something new that I can apply to my own life.
• 
  Didi

  The rollercoasters of entrepreneurship honestly told by the man, Ed Levine. I've been a Serious Eater for so long and had to read this. I loved his honesty about the story of Serious Eats.
  
  It was indeed a rollercoaster. I just put it down and I needed to decompress from the story.
  
  Thank you Ed for sharing your story. I am glad that Serious Eats has lived to tell the tale
• 
  Catherine Woodman

  This is a memoir by the founder of Serious Eats, who started out writing about the things that he loved, that made new York City so special from a food stand point. Pizza and bagels were early subjects, and then he got big dreams and some talented people working with him who have been really big, Kenji Lopez-Alt being the superstar, with his incredible attention to detail and his talent for teaching people to care about it as well. There is also Stella Park who went on to write the iconic book about classic American desserts. The book, however, is a business book more than it’s a food book, and while that’s okay, it is not my jam. Levine has a lot to say about the scramble for survival among the food sites and blogs. There’s a fair amount to learn here about acquisitions and deal structuring and scaling up and monetizing content, but I would have preferred something leaning more heavily on food.
• 
  Ally

  I went into this book thinking it was going to be about food and food writing but it pleasantly surprised me that this was more of a business book. I really enjoyed learning all about the early days of blogging and how it carved a niche in the digital media world. I also truly admire Ed's perseverance to continue to fight for his dream and make it a reality. While you're sitting there thinking "How much more can this guy endure? How does he do it?" when he ends up making his dream a reality, it makes you realize that if you put your mind to it and don't sweat the small stuff (or the big stuff in his case) anything can be possible.
• 
  Caryn

  Wow what a ride! A world of insane acquisitions and hopes and dreams and fighting to live another day for your dreams. The biggest takeaway is the treatment of Ed’s employees and where they are today. That about says it all. Great story well worth the page turning reading. Hints of food and restaurants for added interest. What a nice balance. I was not expecting anything like the business tribulations from this book and it turned out to be a different exciting world of business in the 2000’s. And doing what you believe in.
  Thanks Ed! Quite an inspirational ride.
• 
  Linnea

  Man I almost hate to even give Levine a bad review after all this. This guy wrote the book on business failure. However, I felt like the downfalls were so negative that it made the book imbalanced. I almost don’t even know how Serious Eats is still alive. Sheer luck I guess. It certainly was frustrating to read about.
  
  I like Ed a lot, I just feel like this book wasn’t as good as it could be. Like others, I really wanted a book focused more on the adventures and food, or even what Serious Eats is and what it has become. It wasn’t even an underdog story, it was just purely self deprecation.
• 
  Malcolm

  Had to scan the last half of this short book as I quickly lost interest in all the meetings the author had to raise money for his website. The earlier bits where he is a jazz lover who hustles gigs and celebrates great burgers were more my style. His playlist is worth checking out but ultimately it seemed to me that many of his selections were simply because the song title matched the theme of the chapter.
• 
  Nancy

  More about business than about food
  
  I was disappointed to find that this book was more about starting a business than it was about food. It didn't interest me. The food mentioned was largely things like pizza, hot dogs, and hamburgers - also things that don't hold much interest for me. It wasn't in the same arena as Reichl's or Bourdain's books.
• 
  Susan

  A real nail-biter of a book while the author was looking for financing. And sad while he recollected his childhood, well, his teen years. I never heard of this blog but thanks to this book now have it in my bookmarks and can't wait to try some of the restaurants in NYC soon.
• 
  Iris

  How a guy started a website and employed amazing food writers. Whoa, man. I’m a fan of the website, Serious Eats, but there is no sense of storytelling or raison d’être here. Writing is dull. The glowing blurbs on the book jacket come from current or former employees or promotional beneficiaries.
• 
  Lisa

  Interesting but apparently it was a very long process to get Serious Eats up and running. This book gives a lot of the details, more than I really cared to know about. I love the website but didn't need to know about the stress and aggravation of getting to that point.
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Shaun Stuart

  So much trivia about staying a business. This book is all about business meetings and raising money. It's like Ed walks you though getting his business off the ground in real time. So much of this should have been edited out and something interesting out in it's place.
• 
  Dru

  A well-written story of the founder of Serious Eats. Necessarily, there's a lot of information about funding a site like this, but my favorite parts were Levine's interactions with his family and the food-loving people he hired for Serious Eats.
• 
  Colleen Jenkins

  Not my favorite foodie memoir. I like Serious Eats (the blog) and was interested in how it started and how it ended up. Half the book could have been removed and it would have made me enjoy this a lot more.
• 
  Holly

  4 stars. I enjoyed this book so much! Talk about ups and downs, mystery, emotion, and more. This isn’t a book for everyone, but it was a book for me.