How lucky we are to have John Birdsall, a former professional cook and restaurant critic who writes broadly and deeply about food—which is to say, about culture, politics and what it means to be human. He shifts at ease between the glossy establishment (Food & Wine, Bon Appétit) and the more fractious iconoclasts (First We Feast, the now defunct Lucky Peach), all without ever losing sight of that simple pleasure ... Sometimes his gift is the single perfectly placed word...or a string of them, going off like a chain of fireworks ... Birdsall’s sentences have rhythm, too, and compress time and place so that a meal becomes a history ... He’s just as good with people ... This is not biography as lionization ... In this book, the more famous Beard becomes, the more he recedes. We lose him in the crowd. Birdsall has done extensive research—this is the writer’s dilemma, to have unearthed so much great material, you can’t bear to leave any of it on the cutting-room floor—and grants elaborate paragraphs to almost every person in Beard’s circle, colleagues and enemies alike, so many of them that I kept wishing for an old-fashioned dramatis personae to remind me who they were and why they mattered ... I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened had Birdsall felt freer here to bring in his personal story, beyond the confines of the prologue—to wrestle with Beard directly, to reimagine the possibilities of biography, and in doing so to tell a large story, not just of the past and how we got here but of all the ways we’re still failing ourselves now ... This is the worst thing a reviewer can do, to judge a book against the one not written. But like the greediest of diners, I want more.

Over the course of several juicy chapters, Birdsall traces Beard’s ascent into the elite of New York’s food-obsessed ... The Man Who Ate Too Much unsparingly dismantles the mythology of the jolly asexual bachelor gastronome ... a nuanced and absorbing portrait of an imperfect man, one who reshaped the way several generations of Americans thought about cooking and turned the lens of culinary appreciation away from canned truffles, Swiss Gruyère, and other ingredients imported from Europe and toward Kentucky ham, California wines, and the bounty of local farm stands ... Beard’s legacy is complicated. Among the many merits of Birdsall’s biography is the extent to which it illuminates not just the importance of this foundational American chef, but also the enduring force of his prejudices and delights.

The Man Who Ate Too Much is more than a story of one man’s existence; it is a portrait of 20th-century gay life and aesthetics ... Like the life of James Beard, this biography is big and beautiful, heartbreaking and true. It is the celebration that Beard deserves.

Birdsall has a good story to tell, and tells it well, but he is one of those authors who would amuse others more if he amused himself a little less ... Birdsall is at his best when he relaxes and tells rather than judges.

... engaging ... Though Robert Clark’s James Beard: A Biography revealed aspects of Beard’s private life, Birdsall examines it more closely, placing it into historical context by recounting the oppression gay men faced at the time ... vivid, detaile ... [a] well-balanced narrative ... Highly recommended, this book offers new insight into Beard’s life and time. It also helps another generation of foodies appreciate how Beard shaped American cuisine and helps all of us better understand the struggles LGBQT people faced in the mid-20th century.

... [a] juicy new biography ... What comes through in this sometimes sobering portrait is that the impresario was overextended. Beard rarely said no to a project, even when faced with ridiculously tight deadlines. Although he was good at delegating, he often felt burned out, depressed, and lonely. Birdsall’s book is replete with delicious details—like the centerpieces of bread dough slowly rising at Beard’s 80th birthday celebration—but there are some noticeable gaps. Less focus on Beard’s book deals and more of his recipes would have been welcome. So, too, would consideration of his central role in the creation of the remarkable Four Seasons restaurant. Also missing is a nod to the James Beard Foundation, which carries on Beard’s legacy by nurturing chefs and food writers, in part with its annual awards, the Oscars of the gastronomic sphere.

Birdsall gives the reader an intimate view of gay life in America between 1950 and 1980. His knowledge of gay history and access to primary sources allows him to illustrate the camaraderie that expressed the 'pleasure and the exuberance of intimate lives that they couldn’t otherwise reveal to the world.' An activist himself, Birdsall’s preferred adjective is 'queer,' and what he does in convincing detail is show the reader just how much this demimonde of outcasts influenced American culture.

With loving care, Birdsall details the central irony of James’s life: it was his job to share gastronomic pleasure with the public, but he had to keep his own private desires out of sight ... Birdsall has established himself as our pioneering writer on the unacknowledged role played by closeted gay men in shaping America’s food culture ... Birdsall has done his research with enviable skill ... The most admirable food writing — including The Man Who Ate Too Much — reminds us that enjoying food starts with learning about our own tastes. Good food is the food that pleases us, be it new or familiar.

But the notion of Beard as the keeper of America’s culinary flame merits more skepticism than the book allows, especially when it comes to American cuisine’s non-European influences ... Birdsall makes clear that Beard was focused on the food of European immigrants, a quiet acknowledgment that Beard didn’t seek to speak for all Americans or all their foodways ... Yet throughout the book, Birdsall also essentially describes Beard as the soul of a national cuisine, with no real competing narratives to that central one. Caveats are no match for this grand thesis ... Birdsall is at his best when he focuses squarely on Beard—unearthing his connections to other queer luminaries, and tracing the lines between his memories and his palate. Perhaps a deeper consideration of non-Eurocentric American cooking is too much to ask of a book about this one man’s life. But Birdsall seems to want to tell more than the story of a life, and that’s where he overextends—claiming that Beard embodied American food, instead of letting his subject be important enough on his own.

Birdsall ably opens up his subject’s narrative in astonishing ways. He relies on a bounty of primary-source materials: letters, datebooks, drafts of books and articles, and unpublished interview transcripts, as well as the vast trough of Beard’s published and recorded works ... An immaculate researcher, Birdsall transforms his findings into vivid prose, conjuring a visceral sense of place and time, starting in early 20th-century Portland, Oregon, and ending on New York City’s Lower West Side in 1985. Some of his finest turns of phrase he saves for the food that punctuates Beard’s life ... Make no mistake: This is not a book brimming with food porn. It is an honestly unforgiving portrait stripping away Beard’s immense mythology to lay bare the man beneath ... Though Birdsall’s deep-dive investigation takes some serious luster off Beard’s buffed-to-golden legacy, his deft portrayal reveals a man ahead of his time in so many ways. One just wishes Beard could’ve been more himself in the time that he lived ... one of the finest biographies of recent memory and one of the best culinary biographies around. Consider it required reading for anyone seeking to understand the foundations of modern American cooking and the hard-to-believe-its-true story of the man who played such an outsized role in shaping it.

... in his new book, The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard, John Birdsall ... gives foodies a fresh, intimate look at James Beard ... Food lovers will rejoice at this new portrait of one of America’s all-time culinary greats, cheering for Beard’s shining legacy and empathizing with his disappointments.

... painterly ... These aspects of Beard’s story—both his sins and his suffering—relate directly to many of the problems plaguing today’s food culture, in which debates over authority, identity, and appropriation had long been suppressed ... The story of Beard’s life invites us to recognize the violence that was done in the name of American cooking, and expand our understanding of authenticity to include not only what’s on the plate but everything around it: the norms, prejudices, economic wounds, environmental traumas, and other social forces that go into the production of food and culinary authority. It’s a reminder that food is part of culture, and terroir not simply a matter of the soil.

The author of the groundbreaking article, 'America, Your Food Is So Gay,' turns a sharp but sympathetic eye on the carefully closeted food writer who celebrated the glories of homegrown ingredients and down-home cooking decades before they were fashionable ... A thoughtful appreciation of a central figure in the story of American food culture.

Food writer and cookbook author Birdsall (Hawker Fare) styles Beard the Walt Whitman of 20th-century cooking: he championed fresh, local, seasonal fare against processed and frozen foods, and pioneered New American cuisine by applying French cooking methods to simple American classics ... In Birdsall’s colorful portrait, Beard is a larger-than-life figure ... a rich, entertaining account of an essential tastemaker.