Ian Kelly Cooking For Kings

Show Info

directed by Simon Green

Acclaimed actor and writer, Ian Kelly, presents his solo show about the life of Antonin Careme, the first celebrity chef. Based on Kelly's best-selling biography, Cooking for Kings, the show traces Careme's meteoric rise from abandoned orphan of the French Revolution to international celebrity. Careme cooked for Napolean, the Prince Regent, Tsar Alexander I and Baron de Rothschild, creating both the culy of the great chef and the very concept of French haute cusine. His journey takes us from the gutters of 18th century Paris to the pleasure palaces of Europe in the greatest age of culinary indulgence, but also explores the passion—and violence—that inspires great cooking—as well as the terrible price paid by so many kitchen workers—then as now. This dramatic and richly comic below-stairs perspective on one of the most momentous, and sensuous periods of European history brings alive the very smells and tastes of life in the kitchens of First Empire Paris, Georgian Brighton and the Russia of War and Peace.