Eatdrink Waterloo & Wellington #5 February/March 2019
The LOCAL food & drink magazine serving Waterloo Region and Wellington County
The LOCAL food & drink magazine serving Waterloo Region and Wellington County
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44 | <strong>February</strong>/<strong>March</strong> <strong>2019</strong><br />
eatdrink.ca |@eatdrinkmag<br />
Books<br />
Plate of Darkness<br />
Apocalypse Chow<br />
A Remix of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness<br />
by David Julian Wightman<br />
Review by DARIN COOK<br />
A<br />
Toronto-educated, Ottawa-based<br />
journalist has given the restaurant<br />
scene a wild makeover —not by<br />
cooking elaborate dishes, mixing<br />
exotic drinks, or waiting tables with exquisite<br />
aplomb, but by brewing up a fictional<br />
rendering of chefs in grand literary style.<br />
Introduced in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart<br />
of Darkness in 1899, Kurtz and Marlow are two<br />
names oozing with literary history. Francis<br />
Ford Coppola famously adopted the characters<br />
into the 1979 Hollywood blockbuster<br />
Apocalypse Now. With a tip of the hat to<br />
both those classics, David Julian Wightman<br />
has written a parody of Conrad’s story and<br />
Coppola’s movie by giving Kurtz and Marlow<br />
new culinary identities in his self-published<br />
book, Apocalypse Chow: A Remix of Joseph<br />
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2018).<br />
The story starts at Belly, New York’s hottest<br />
restaurant, with the usual<br />
suspects gathering after a<br />
weekend closing. Along with<br />
Wightman’s readers, the<br />
group of chefs, busboys and<br />
waiters are led down a path<br />
exploring the dark corners of<br />
the restaurant world. Charlie<br />
Marlow points out to his<br />
colleagues that Manhattan<br />
is “one of the dark places<br />
of the Earth,” but the rest<br />
of them know he has seen<br />
harsher territories in a swathe<br />
of illustrious restaurants<br />
jobs, the wildest of all being<br />
his time at Chow, a remote<br />
destination restaurant in<br />
northern Ontario. Walter<br />
Kurtz was the head chef at<br />
Author David Julian Wightman<br />
Chow and gained<br />
a reputation as<br />
the most talented<br />
chef in Canada.<br />
But he went<br />
rogue, and the<br />
restaurant<br />
owners wanted<br />
to part ways<br />
with the unorthodox<br />
chef. They recruited Marlow, a legendary<br />
restaurant manager in his own right, to track<br />
down and relieve the renegade chef of his<br />
duties.<br />
Nearly the entire novella is in Marlow’s<br />
words as he tells his restaurant brethren at<br />
Belly about his venture into the hinterlands<br />
to confront Chef Kurtz. As a veteran in the<br />
field, Marlow knows “the restaurant industry<br />
can be a stifling thing, a burden we choose<br />
to carry, to varying degrees<br />
of commitment. It can turn<br />
men into monsters.” He<br />
yearns to know what drove<br />
Kurtz over the deep end<br />
and into the weeds, because<br />
firing the best chef in Canada<br />
seemed a tall order without<br />
knowing the full story. It<br />
took some time for Marlow<br />
and his crew to trek by land<br />
and river to the secluded<br />
restaurant. He tells us how<br />
“the journey felt like a<br />
tortured night at work, when<br />
the hordes are at table and<br />
the restaurant struggles to<br />
cope … the madness of an<br />
out-of-control service.” He<br />
used the time to contemplate