What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci review – one bite too many?

The Hollywood star’s fourth food book starts well enough but quickly descends into bland anecdote, leaving his endearing charm and wit to season an empty plate

I must admit that I was slightly surprised by the appearance of Stanley Tucci’s latest book. If I were to write on such a theme, the result would be the size of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or a Victorian family Bible, fit only to be wheeled around on a small trolley. His effort, though, has an outwardly quite sensible girth, and when you open it, white space abounds. Add to this the advisory subtitle “And Related Thoughts” (ah, so there’s some general pontificating involved, as well as musings on breakfast, lunch and dinner) and, even before you start reading, the buffet is beginning to seem a touch decimated.

What I Ate in One Year takes the form of a diary. When it opens in January 2023, Tucci, a Golden Globe and Emmy-winning actor, has just arrived in Rome to film Conclave, a papal thriller based on the novel by Robert Harris. Already missing his wife and children, he finds himself in a not-very-hospitable apartment hotel – an experience that is, alas, an integral part of life on the movie-making road (though someone from production has at least stocked his kitchen with pasta, tinned tomatoes and new knives). But never mind. On the plus side, there are his co-stars. One is Isabella Rossellini, who takes him to a restaurant her mother, Ingrid Bergman, loved, where a superfluity of nuns sings hymns to diners as they eat. Another is Ralph Fiennes, with whom Tucci shares a preference for – these sensitive guys – the softer, less tannic red wines of the Italian north.

Continue reading…

Please follow and like us: