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.
For any book, this would be a goodish start. Isabella Rossellini! Ralph Fiennes! And immediately, too, the reader is reminded of Tucci’s particular charm, which has to do not only with his modesty and wit, but with the fact that he so smoothly and wisely balances fame and normality (many well-known actors, if not most, are unable – or unwilling – to pull off this trick). He likes to travel by train; he eats in restaurants alone; he doesn’t expect special treatment from waiters. It’s endearing to know he always takes his own food on set, in the expectation the catering will be dispiritingly bad, and his tastes are mostly simple. Among the longings he describes in What I Ate in One Year is for a salad of dandelion leaves, a dish that reminds him of his childhood, when the Italian immigrants of Westchester, New York, would collect them from along the parkways that led to Manhattan (while Tucci now lives in west London, his American parents are of Italian descent).
But after this, we’re on a sharply downward slide. Tucci has already written three bestselling food books, and my feeling at this point is that he has little left to say – at least on this subject. How many times must we hear how much he loves marinara sauce? Or artichokes? Or aubergine? There are only so many ways to say something is delicious. A lot of space is devoted in this volume to the food in the lounges of airports and the (I assume) business class cabins of planes, and while these passages are very boring indeed, even they’re not so yawn-inducing as the bits about security checks and delayed flights (personally, I would only be inclined to read a five-and-a-half page account of a round trip by air to Aspen if it were by a bona fide genius such as Craig Brown or Geoff Dyer – and I’d still pour a drink first). Tucci has designed a range of cookware, which is fine by me, even if I’m not in the market for a celebrity colander. But when he writes about it here, it seems shabby, whatever his intentions.
Occasionally, there are mentions of famous friends such as Jamie Dornan, Saoirse Ronan and Harry Styles (who likes the poet Rilke, apparently), all of whom come for dinner; Tucci and his brother-in-law, the actor John Krasinski, have an away day at Guy Ritchie’s country house, and it’s like something out of Ritchie’s (dire) Netflix series, The Gentlemen. But he’s ever clam-like about other people. In June, he has dinner at the River Cafe in London with Colin Firth and Tom Ford. “What we talked about is none of your business,” he writes, which strikes me as a somewhat bracing approach to reader relations. If you’re unwilling to invade anyone’s privacy, why bother to publish a diary at all? Naturally, I think I know the answer to this question (and so do you, too, probably). But as someone who has written for her entire living for more than two decades, I must squeeze a little lemon here. The impulses involved in this book on all sides feel depressingly cynical to me, for it’s thinner than freshly rolled fettuccine.
• What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci is published by Fig Tree (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
