Stanley Tucci’s Instagram videos about making cocktails became deservedly famous during lockdown: here was a man of saturnine charisma dressing well and concocting delicious drinks while the rest of us were lounging around despairingly in stained joggers. He published a bestselling foodist memoir, Taste, in 2021, and presented a culinary travelogue, Searching for Italy, on BBC Two. All this has made him so much better known than he used to be that this follow-up volume can take the form merely of an abbreviated diary of one year in the itinerant lifestyle of a global celebrity: Being Stanley Tucci.
Tucci is often going to bad restaurants. In Rome, he visits a place recommended by the hotel’s front desk. “I would not recommend it,” he writes tartly, but what he ate and why it was bad shall remain a mystery. At other places we learn only that “the food was superb” or that it was “classically delicious Roman fare”; a quick tropical holiday, meanwhile, was “a good time with good weather, good food, and good friends”. This is the kind of gruff thumbs up that worked for Hemingway in his Parisian novels but may be deemed less nutritious in a book specifically about victuals.
At last, on page 74, the author’s pent-up frustrations explode when he visits an Italian place in London, where he lives with his wife, Felicity Blunt, sister of actor Emily. “None of it was particularly good and the focaccia was actually gross,” he complains: “it tasted like someone had run it over with a burning car.” Later the same day he attends a dinner for film moguls in a hotel: “The food was fucking awful.” Now that’s what we came for. Tucci’s constant grumbling about the indignities of international travel, meanwhile, is at last justified by a tremendous six-page tale of airport disaster, reminiscent of the travails of John Cleese in Clockwise.
When the author pauses to expatiate on the meaning of food, there is a certain amount of the usual pabulum. “We become what we eat. Eat unhealthily, become unhealthy.” (Sure. Eat fish, become a fish.) But there are also delightful passages that rise above the phatic foodie incantation of ingredients and dish names. Tucci enthuses about a YouTube video of a man frying and eating a basketful of snakes, and describes in mouth-watering detail how Guy Ritchie cooks him a steak in his barbecue tent, geeking out blissfully on all the copper-clad outdoor cooking gear.
There are a handful of recipes scattered through the text (Tucci Minestrone, Rabbit Legs), though he often refers the reader back to Taste. “I’ve already written about the sad state of Italian film catering in my first book,” he says, while complaining about the catering on Conclave, which he is acting in with Ralph Fiennes.
Fiennes (“Ralph”) becomes a starry friend to add to Tucci’s splendid entourage, which also includes “our friend Holly Willoughby”, “the lovely David Tennant”, “our friends Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds”, “my new best friend Robert D[owney] Jr”, and Harry Styles. At one point we even learn that the newly crowned King Charles, on being invited to dinner at the Italian embassy, says he will go “but only if Stanley Tucci is invited as well”. (Alas, the event does not happen.) He attends Jilly Cooper’s summer party, marvelling wickedly at the energy of “someone who has basically lived on mayonnaise and champagne for eighty-six years”.
Tucci is so suavely self-deprecating that one can hardly begrudge him any of this. At one point he muses on how he has always been oriented more towards the past than the future and reveals: “I love mudlarking along the Thames foreshore.” Curious! Alas we don’t learn more because he is off to be interviewed in Manhattan. He’s not so stuck in his ways, however, that he doesn’t appreciate his new air fryer (“amazing contraption”); elsewhere he offers a little rhapsody on eggs, finishing: “I also love egg cups.” Bless. He is very sweet about his children and hates Halloween, all of which means that, even if this particular book is more of a snack than a three-course meal, Tucci remains a fabulous charmer.
• What I Ate in One Year (and Related Thoughts) by Stanley Tucci is published by Fig Tree (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
