Extra sauce is how she likes her pizza and also how she falls in love. Zahra Tangorra opens with this declaration and does not back down from it for three hundred pages.
At twenty-two, a near-death experience forced her to ask the only questions that matter: Who am I? What do I love? The answers came from the kitchen — from the stuffed shells at J&J’s on Long Island, from her mother’s chocolate mousse pie, from the cult-favourite Brooklyn restaurant Brucie, which she opened to rapturous acclaim and then closed at the height of its popularity.
Where Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter made the restaurant memoir a vehicle for reckoning with appetite in all its forms, Tangorra is working similar territory with more vulnerability and less armour. The demand for extra sauce is not greed. It is a refusal to accept that this is all the joy you get.
The last meal she cooked for her father. The beautiful things at the bottom of grief.
