Rick Tramanto started as a high school dropout with a learning disability and a drug addiction, but he has become one of the top celebrity chefs in the world. In Scars of a Chef, Tramanto tells his story, all the highs and lows, and how God met him when he needed it most. He also shares recipes, and 8 pages of color photos.

Rick Tramonto started as a high school dropout working at Wendy’s; he became one of the hottest celebrity chefs in the world. Yet his rise to culinary success was marked with tragedy, loss, and abandonment. As a teenager, Rick worked to support the family when his father (who had Mob ties) went to prison. As a young adult, he struggled with a learning disability and drug addiction. Yet as a chef, he rose rapidly to culinary stardom, earning rave reviews and eventually opening the famous four-star establishment Tru. From the outside, it looked like he had everything he ever wanted; his lifelong hunger for meaning should have been more than met. But on the inside, his life and his marriage were falling apart. And then, one night, a voice on the radio changed everything. Containing recipes and color photos, Scars of a Chef is the mesmerizing rags-to-riches memoir of one chef’s journey through the highest heights and the lowest lows of the culinary world . . . and his search for something that would finally heal his wounds and sustain him through even the darkest times.

Rick Tramonto served as executive chef/partner at the world-renowned four-star restaurant Tru in Chicago. He has received a bevy of awards and honors including the James Beard Foundation for Best Chef and Food & Wine Magazine's Top 10 Best New Chefs. He started his culinary career in 1977 at Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers in Rochester, NY, and has gone on to work with other master chefs around the world. An accomplished cookbook author, Tramonto has also appeared on shows such as Oprah, The Today Show, Iron Chef America, Top Chef, and most recently Top Chef Masters.

Scars of a Chef details the journey of celebrity chef Rick Tramonto from his humble beginnings as a cook at Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers to a multi-restaurant entrepreneur. It tells the story of his personal choices from depression to born-again Christian.

On the one hand, the book provides lessons in tenacity, goal setting, creative energy, diligent studies, and positive networking. On the other hand, it reveals how fame and popularity can make a person arrogant, selfish, overconfident, careless, and self-destructive. Tramonto is candid about his battle with food, first as someone who ate too much of it and then as someone who mastered its artistry as a way of finding fame and fortune. He also talks about misuse of drugs to deal with bouts of feeling like a failure or needing an extra boost to keep working when his body was saying he needed rest. Food enthusiasts, fans, and readers unfamiliar with Tramonto's success will enjoy this honest telling of an incredible journey through success and failure. At times the story drags through many job transitions. However, the conversational tone made this book an enjoyable story overall.

Tramonto's discovery that the world and all its pleasures had precious little of lasting value to offer him led to a relationship with Jesus Christ. His testimony is genuine and impressive. In short, this chef's book is a tasty morsel. – Bethany Sievert, www.ChristianBookPreviews.com

Chef and cookbook author Tramonto (Steak with Friends) has won acclaim for his restaurants and cookbooks, and in this memoir he takes readers into the kitchen to show them a chef's life. It ain't pretty, but it is edifying. As he was growing up in a volatile working-class family in Rochester, N.Y., Tramonto's dad was jailed for embezzlement, and young Rick, struggling with a learning disability, left high school in 1977 for his first culinary job, at Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers. He paid dues all along the way, working with terrifically talented and not a few temperamental chefs, succeeding (earning four-star reviews) and failing (losing a restaurant to fire, divorcing his culinary partner and wife, Gale Gand). As he narrates it, only when he hears a Christian radio broadcast one dark day in his car does he begin to find a way out. Tramonto and his co-writer favor speed over detail and successfully convey how driven and intensely focused the author's career has been. Anyone with a romantic view of the restaurant business should read this mea culpa and redemption tale. (Mar.) Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information.

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