Stanley Tucci’s Instagram videos about making cocktails became deservedly famous during lockdown: here was a man of saturnine charisma dressing well and concocting delicious drinks while the rest of us were lounging around despairingly in stained joggers. He published a bestselling foodist memoir, Taste, in 2021, and presented a culinary travelogue, Searching for Italy, on BBC Two. All this has made him so much better known than he used to be that this follow-up volume can take the form merely of an abbreviated diary of one year in the itinerant lifestyle of a global celebrity: Being Stanley Tucci.
Tucci is often going to bad restaurants. In Rome, he visits a place recommended by the hotel’s front desk. “I would not recommend it,” he writes tartly, but what he ate and why it was bad shall remain a mystery. At other places we learn only that “the food was superb” or that it was “classically delicious Roman fare”; a quick tropical holiday, meanwhile, was “a good time with good weather, good food, and good friends”. This is the kind of gruff thumbs up that worked for Hemingway in his Parisian novels but may be deemed less nutritious in a book specifically about victuals.
