Les Liaisons Culinaires

by Andreas Staïkos

Overview

Dimitris and Damocles live in the same block of flats. They share a love of cooking, and, it soon transpires, a lover - Nana. What follows is the story of their competition to win Nana's heart through her appetite. As the plates pile up, and the recipes grow ever more mouth watering, a bizarre and comic duel develops, fought with sea-urchin salads, stuffed vine leaves and delicacies from all corners of the Aegean to win the consummate femme fatale or to end up with the sting in the tail...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781446475232
Publisher:	Random House
Publication date:	06/08/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	106
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Andreas Staikos, an Athenian, was born in 1944. He has written and directed several works for theatre and has also translated into Greek works by Marivaux, Molière and other French classics from the eighteenth centuries.

Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife teaches English language and literature in Athens and works as a translator.

Editorial Reviews

This is the most delicious book that you will ever read.

EBOOK COMMENTARY

A curvaceous little tale of a pair of suitors, Dimitris and Damocles, who vie for the favours of their mutual mistress through the medium of the mezze . . . Call it culinary onanism for greek gastronomes. And, incidentally, the recipes are terrific. —Good Book Guide

Elizabeth Luard

This is the most delicious book that you will ever read.

Times

Food is love, both literally and figuratively, in Staikos's cheeky debut novel, a cross between a cookbook and a romantic and culinary comedy of manners, in which two Greek neighbors attempt to outcook each other and thus curry the favor of the married mistress they share. Damocles Dimou and Dimitris Isavridis are the urbane, accomplished gentlemen who find themselves engaged in a war for the affections of their sensuous, sexy mistress, Nana, with food as the weapon of choice. All three protagonists seem to get satisfaction from the various couplings, but Nana's fickle ways and her love of teasing create a game of dating one-upmanship that lands in the kitchen as well as the bedroom as the two bachelors try to outdo each other with one seductive Greek recipe after another. Staikos, a chef who has penned half a dozen plays, is an engaging comic writer with a talent for erotically tinged scenes featuring plenty of food foreplay, but his inability to formulate a real plot is quickly exposed when he runs out of variations on his soup-and-seduction formula. The concept of marrying a cookbook with an erotic comedy is enticing, and readers who cook will certainly appreciate the exotic recipes reproduced in a series of attractive postcards accompanying the book. Staikos tries to spice up the ending when Nana drops a bomb on her two suitors, but the absence of plot and the one-dimensional characters suggest the book should be stocked in the cookbook section. B&w illus. by Jeff Fisher. (Dec.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

What to do with a cookbook disguised as a novel? This tasty oddity from Greek chef and playwright Staikos offers palate pleasers of all kinds, but the main story (two men try to win over the same woman with comestible come-ons) offers more as a concept than it does on the page. Dimitris and Damocles are neighbors whose balconies face each other. Their first contact reveals to the latter that the former is not only involved with his woman, but preparing for her the very same parsley salad that he concocts. Nana is a married woman in love only with the meals her paramour du jour has set before her. As the men become acquainted, Damocles's knowledge about the situation becomes too painful to keep to himself, but making Dimitris the wiser sets in motion an anguished competition in which they try to outwit each other. Failing that, each confronts Nana with what he knows, only to be told by her that she will break off with his rival-after a respectful interval. In the end, by now fast friends and deeper in love with the duplicitous Nana than ever, the men decide to place their fate on competing plates of moussaka: winner of Nana's palate take all. If the menage seems too harebrained and frivolous, try the rabbit stew with some rocket salad.

Kirkus Reviews