Reading this slender, rich exploration of what it means to cook for others is like pulling up a chair at the ideal dinner party. The food is mouth-watering – creamy curries, candied baobab seeds, fat slices of homemade pizza – but just as nourishing is the conversation, which embraces hospitality in its many guises, from the strained welcome received by Syrian refugees in the author’s adoptive Germany to the langar, a free meal served in Sikh temples ... Add a pinch of Derrida and a slug of retro pop culture, and you’ve got an irresistible amuse-bouche.

Basil moves from childhood domesticity — Mumji, her own cute greediness, her mother’s precious kadhi — to wider public issues, interrogating each in the context of hospitality: democracy, climate change, immigration, religion, food waste and Brexit, to name a few ... If we could learn to love beyond the narrow compounds of our own communities, we would become more hospitable creatures. Borders would crumble, resources would be shared and nobody would starve — these are the logical results of universal unconditional hospitality. In other words, if the whole world digested Be My .Guest, we’d be OK ... It won’t happen, of course, and Basil doesn’t pretend that it will. Chauvinists, xenophobes, climate change deniers— inhospitable people the world over — will detest her compellingly beautiful book. From certain angles, her quest looks like hard work. At times, I wondered if Basil ever gets tired of such moral vigilance and longs to sneak off for a small bacon sandwich. But I doubt it overall. Her choices don’t feel like chores. There is — I gather from her book — deep happiness to be unearthed along the way.

For anyone who enjoyed the travelogues of Anthony Bourdain, Be My Guest is a deeper and weightier exposition of the themes he explored—starting with food and extending to the movements of governments, and the meaning of self and other—and Basil similarly shares the joys of both writing and eating ... Interwoven with these richly textured memories are personal, sometimes self-deprecating, observations on her own relationships with these women, and their choice foods ... Her own background provides plenty of fodder...which she mines very successfully ... Basil’s candor and depth of examination and feeling, along with her moving turns of phrase, is compelling.

In Be My Guest, Priya Basil offers a rich meditation on the nature of hospitality, inviting readers to question the relationship between host and guest and to examine the philosophical contradictions at play ... Food provides the backdrop to candid musings on hospitality, community and race. Basil, born to a British Sikh family, grew up in Kenya before returning to England as a young adult and then settling in Germany ... Philosophical and political passages are balanced with lighter observations about mealtime behaviours: the instinct to choose the same dish to stave off disappointment; the tendency to gorge on a new food; the ways we negotiate the taking of the last portion ... The root of 'hospitality', Priya Basil learns, comes from the ancient Indo-European word ghosti, meaning host, guest and stranger simultaneously.

[Basil] moves quickly from the personal to the political. She observes that she will always be a guest in the sense of being an outsider, as a Brit born to an Indian Sikh family who grew up in Kenya, and a woman with brown skin who now lives in Berlin and holds German citizenship ... Basil cleverly manages to pair our greatest love – food – with our greatest fear – the other. Her writing is serious and invigorating. If you fear an invasion of your home this Christmas, or are wondering how to be the best guest elsewhere, line your stomach with Be My Guest first.

We are all guests in this world, from even before the moment of birth (gestation): so Basil has come to understand throughout her remarkable life, and details in this memoir ... Finding inspiration even from abstruse philosopher Jacques Derrida, Basil chooses to welcome all, both foreigners and refugees, with generosity.

In these short and sometimes meandering musings, in which the author enlists the wisdom of Plato, Kant, Hannah Arendt, Peter Singer, and other thinkers, Basil explores what it means to be a woman, an immigrant, a host, and a guest through the backdrop of food, specifically the Indian food that reflects her Sikh background ... The tone is conversational, but the author also touches on deep subjects such as racism, food waste, and how food can be healing, seductive, or even used as a weapon. Although a quick read, the book offers plenty of room for contemplation ... Careful considerations of the wide world of food and 'the life-play of hospitality.'

Novelist Basil draws on memoir, storytelling, religion, politics, and philosophy in this delightful and ruminative culinary cultural study ... Basil playfully begins this series of observations with the most primal guest-host relationship: 'Mothers... host us as no one else can—in their bodies.' ... Basil’s powerful intellectual curiosity is sure to intrigue readers.