The Hundred-Foot Journey »

Richard C. Morais was a Senior Editor at Forbes and the magazine's longest serving foreign correspondent. An American raised in Switzerland, Morais has lived most of his life overseas, returning to the United States in 2003. He was stationed in London for 17 years, where he was Forbes' European Bureau Chief. He now lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter. The Hundred-Foot Journey is his first novel.

That skinny Indian teenager has that mysterious something that comes along once a generation. He is one of those rare chefs who is simply born. He is an artist."

And so begins the rise of Hassan Haji, the unlikely gourmand who recounts his life's journey in Richard Morais's charming novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey. Lively and brimming with the colors, flavors, and scents of the kitchen, The Hundred-Foot Journey is a succulent treat about family, nationality, and the mysteries of good taste.

Born above his grandfather's modest restaurant in Mumbai, Hassan first experienced life through intoxicating whiffs of spicy fish curry, trips to the local markets, and gourmet outings with his mother. But when tragedy pushes the family out of India, they console themselves by eating their way around the world, eventually settling in Lumiére, a small village in the French Alps.

The boisterous Haji family takes Lumiére by storm. They open an inexpensive Indian restaurant opposite an esteemed French relais—that of the famous chef Madame Mallory—and infuse the sleepy town with the spices of India, transforming the lives of its eccentric villagers and infuriating their celebrated neighbor. Only after Madame Mallory wages culinary war with the immigrant family, does she finally agree to mentor young Hassan, leading him to Paris, the launch of his own restaurant, and a slew of new adventures.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is about how the hundred-foot distance between a new Indian kitchen and a traditional French one can represent the gulf between different cultures and desires. A testament to the inevitability of destiny, this is a fable for the ages—charming, endearing, and compulsively readable.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The Hundred-Foot Journey blew my smug preconceptions to bits. Morais's fictional biography captures the dirt, passion, and madness of a chef's life and spices it with one extra ingredient: he can really write. The best chefs have an enthralling, if raw, intensity, and while Anthony Bourdain, for one, slings his ink with panache, most writing chefs tend to rocket through a life marked by food, sex, and drugs with the same curt bravado with which they survive nightly service; it's often hard to discern why they chose such a brutal career. Morais, on the other hand, so deftly weaves food into the fabric of every moment that one can't imagine his protagonist doing anything in life except cooking.