Professionals & Academics
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Savor: A Chef's Hunger for More
A young chef whose dreams were cut short savors every last minute as she explores food and adventure, illness and mortality in Savor, a stunning, lyrical memoir and family story that sweeps from Pakistan to New York City and beyond.
"Ali's strength and passion for food and her culture shines through. . . . This memoir is a tribute to the extraordinary life and impact she made in twenty-nine years."-Oprah Daily (20 of the Best Fall Nonfiction Books of 2022)
Fatima Ali won the hearts of viewers as the Fan Favorite of Bravo's Top Chef in season fifteen. Twenty-nine years old, she was a dynamic, boundary-breaking chef and a bright new voice for change in the food world. After the taping wrapped and before the show aired, Fati was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Not one to ever slow down or admit defeat, the star chef vowed to spend her final year traveling the world, eating delicious food, and making memories with her loved ones. But when her condition abruptly worsened, her plans were sidelined. She pivoted, determined to make her final days count as she worked to tell the story of a brown girl chef who set out to make a name for herself, her food, and her culture.
Including writing from Fatima during her last months and contributions by her mother, Farezeh, and her collaborator, Tarajia Morrell, Savor is a deftly woven account and an inspiring ode to the food, family, and countries Fatima loved so much. Alternating between past and present, readers are transported back to Pakistan and the childhoods of both Fatima and Farezeh, each deeply affected by cultural barriers that shaped the course of their lives. From the rustic stalls of the outdoor markets of Karachi to the kitchen and dining room of Meadowood, the acclaimed three-star Michelin restaurant where she apprenticed, Fati reflects on her life and her identity as a chef, a daughter, and a queer woman butting up against traditional views.
Savor is a triumphant memoir, at once an exploration of the sense of wonder that made Fatima so special and a shining testament to the resilience of the human spirit. At its core, it is a story about what it means to truly live, a profound and exquisite portrait of savoring every moment.
"Ali's strength and passion for food and her culture shines through. . . . This memoir is a tribute to the extraordinary life and impact she made in twenty-nine years."-Oprah Daily (20 of the Best Fall Nonfiction Books of 2022)
Fatima Ali won the hearts of viewers as the Fan Favorite of Bravo's Top Chef in season fifteen. Twenty-nine years old, she was a dynamic, boundary-breaking chef and a bright new voice for change in the food world. After the taping wrapped and before the show aired, Fati was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Not one to ever slow down or admit defeat, the star chef vowed to spend her final year traveling the world, eating delicious food, and making memories with her loved ones. But when her condition abruptly worsened, her plans were sidelined. She pivoted, determined to make her final days count as she worked to tell the story of a brown girl chef who set out to make a name for herself, her food, and her culture.
Including writing from Fatima during her last months and contributions by her mother, Farezeh, and her collaborator, Tarajia Morrell, Savor is a deftly woven account and an inspiring ode to the food, family, and countries Fatima loved so much. Alternating between past and present, readers are transported back to Pakistan and the childhoods of both Fatima and Farezeh, each deeply affected by cultural barriers that shaped the course of their lives. From the rustic stalls of the outdoor markets of Karachi to the kitchen and dining room of Meadowood, the acclaimed three-star Michelin restaurant where she apprenticed, Fati reflects on her life and her identity as a chef, a daughter, and a queer woman butting up against traditional views.
Savor is a triumphant memoir, at once an exploration of the sense of wonder that made Fatima so special and a shining testament to the resilience of the human spirit. At its core, it is a story about what it means to truly live, a profound and exquisite portrait of savoring every moment.
Editorial Reviews
"Ali's narrative extends beyond her life experiences to include her mother Farezeh's story, which begins in Karachi, Pakistan. Chapters are written from both women's perspectives and are skillfully stitched together by writer Tarajia Morrell, who came onto the project to document Ali's final bucket-list year before everyone soon realized, tragically, that there would be no time for that. Instead, Savor explores the ways identity often butts up against tradition and what it means to savor life despite everything."-Eater ("Fall's 10 Essential Food Reads")
"With her own stories and entries from mother Farezeh and coauthor Tarajia Morrell, Ali's strength and passion for food and her culture shines through. Ali passed away in 2019 from bone cancer, and this memoir is a tribute to the extraordinary life and impact she made in 29 years."-Oprah Daily ("20 of the Best Fall Nonfiction Books of 2022")
"An exceptional account of the life of an exceptional woman, so talented and gone too soon. Savor is moving, heartbreaking, and defiantly hopeful."-Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of The Last White Man and Exit West
"James Beard Award–winning chef Ali delivers a powerful ode to family and food in her posthumous memoir. . . . Ali writes with an irresistible passion for food, friendship, and community, and contributions by [her mother] beautifully complement Ali's account. This portrait of a remarkable talent whose life was cut short is a tough one to forget."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This book shines with the author's irrepressible spirit, positivity, and tenacity. . . . Her love of food and people and belief in the future are evident throughout the text. Perhaps most striking are her determination and work ethic, as she recounts starting out as a chef working 16-hour days, seven days per week. In her battle with cancer, she displayed unwavering toughness and determination. Ali's adoration of the art of cooking is apparent, infectious, and often moving. Ali's irrepressibl...
"With her own stories and entries from mother Farezeh and coauthor Tarajia Morrell, Ali's strength and passion for food and her culture shines through. Ali passed away in 2019 from bone cancer, and this memoir is a tribute to the extraordinary life and impact she made in 29 years."-Oprah Daily ("20 of the Best Fall Nonfiction Books of 2022")
"An exceptional account of the life of an exceptional woman, so talented and gone too soon. Savor is moving, heartbreaking, and defiantly hopeful."-Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of The Last White Man and Exit West
"James Beard Award–winning chef Ali delivers a powerful ode to family and food in her posthumous memoir. . . . Ali writes with an irresistible passion for food, friendship, and community, and contributions by [her mother] beautifully complement Ali's account. This portrait of a remarkable talent whose life was cut short is a tough one to forget."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This book shines with the author's irrepressible spirit, positivity, and tenacity. . . . Her love of food and people and belief in the future are evident throughout the text. Perhaps most striking are her determination and work ethic, as she recounts starting out as a chef working 16-hour days, seven days per week. In her battle with cancer, she displayed unwavering toughness and determination. Ali's adoration of the art of cooking is apparent, infectious, and often moving. Ali's irrepressibl...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
ITWAAR BAZAAR
Fatima
I grew up in Pakistan, playing cricket, basketball, oonch neech, and pithu gol garam with my brother, Mohammad.
When it was rainy season or too hot to be outside, we canvassed our grandparents' basement for hints of a world that pre-dated our small brown hands and hungry minds. I idolized my grandmother, my mother's mother, who I called Nano, a tenacious, fair-skinned beauty whose shalwar kameez always carried with it the powdery rose elegance of Chanel No. 5. From when I was six and we lived with her, I often joined her on her weekly excursions to the Itwaar Bazaar, the Sunday market that unfolded like a circus on a plowed plot of dirt in a skeletal, undeveloped neighborhood in Karachi. At my grandmother's behest, we set out early, in order not to miss the best produce. While we guzzled water and used the toilet, Nano counted her cash and had Qadir, our family's cook who had been with us since my mom's youth, check the boot of the car to be sure it was empty and ready to be filled. Nano ruled the house, our small staff-a member of which delivered us to the market in our Honda Accord, bedazzled with its Italian Momo rainbow steering wheel cover-and our days, particularly in those in-between years when my mom was building her business. Nano was a second mother to me, and it was more than obvious that her prowess in the kitchen was connected to her confidence in the world.
Before we made our way through the rows of stalls-vegetables on one side, fruit on the other-the mazdoors would line up, chests puffed out, shoulders back to imply strength and stamina. In Urdu, a mazdoor is a young boy-probably homeless, possibly orphaned, certainly too poor to attend school-who works as a porter and makes money carrying groceries for wealthier patrons at the market. Past the mazdoors, the farmers sold their produce: lauqat, jaman, lychee, cheekoo, small sweet green sultana grapes; yams, gourds, arvi, and ruby red carrots. The pungent fragrance-a saccharine crushed guava underfoot, wilting greens, the rank damp shirts of farmers who awoke before dawn to haul their loads to town, potatoes with a film of dusty dried soil still clinging to them-made for an intoxicating perfume at once bodily and of the earth. I was supposed to dread these market runs, as all children and most adults did, but secretly I loved them. I followed my grandmother, sometimes pressed right up against her damp silk-draped frame-her sweet signature scent still discernible amid the odiferous hubbub-as she perused the bright stalls, surveying what she planned to purchase, sweat forming rivulets between her shoulder blades and at her temples, which, like all the other matrons, she dabbed with the corner of her dupatta. Who has the greenest beans? The snappiest okra? The onions have to be large but not too large, because those ones are the sweetest.
Produce was selected not just for its ripeness in the moment, but for its future perfection. Nano taught me to feel melons near their stems, that they should be heavier than they appear; to press pears gently; to smell mangos for sweetness to determine their readiness. Then came her masterful bargaining: first mild interest, then an ambivalent How much? No matter what price the vendor told her, it was always too much. Fifty rupees?! she scoffed with feigned horror. Your friend there just offered me the very same dates for forty rupees. I'll buy them from him. Then she turned gravely on her heel with dismissive finality, but every time, the vendor rushed to her, leaving his stall to block her path, a wagging head and smiling eyes offering her a nicer price. Wait, Baaji Malik, I'll match his price, but only for you, tell no one, and she'd give a barely perceptible nod to confirm her approval. At the market, my glamorous Nano was notorious and revered, and from her I learned how to shop-to select, to haggle-in that drenched tent, that humid carnival of perishables.
After the produce, trailed by a mazdoor who carried our haul in jute and plastic bags that Nano brought from home, we made our way to the meat market, where we chose our chickens from the specialized stalls that sold only chickens, and from its owner my grandmother once again tried to get the best possible deal. Nano signaled to the butcher which of the birds she wanted from the piled-up cages and he pulled each bird from its cage, rested its feathered neck on a wooden block held between his feet, and slit the chicken's throat. The blood-thick, crimson and clotted as fresh cream-gushed out into a waiting bucket, and then he tossed the bird, still pulsing, into a large industrial blue bin, lined with feathers and crusted gore of chickens that had come before, where it...
ITWAAR BAZAAR
Fatima
I grew up in Pakistan, playing cricket, basketball, oonch neech, and pithu gol garam with my brother, Mohammad.
When it was rainy season or too hot to be outside, we canvassed our grandparents' basement for hints of a world that pre-dated our small brown hands and hungry minds. I idolized my grandmother, my mother's mother, who I called Nano, a tenacious, fair-skinned beauty whose shalwar kameez always carried with it the powdery rose elegance of Chanel No. 5. From when I was six and we lived with her, I often joined her on her weekly excursions to the Itwaar Bazaar, the Sunday market that unfolded like a circus on a plowed plot of dirt in a skeletal, undeveloped neighborhood in Karachi. At my grandmother's behest, we set out early, in order not to miss the best produce. While we guzzled water and used the toilet, Nano counted her cash and had Qadir, our family's cook who had been with us since my mom's youth, check the boot of the car to be sure it was empty and ready to be filled. Nano ruled the house, our small staff-a member of which delivered us to the market in our Honda Accord, bedazzled with its Italian Momo rainbow steering wheel cover-and our days, particularly in those in-between years when my mom was building her business. Nano was a second mother to me, and it was more than obvious that her prowess in the kitchen was connected to her confidence in the world.
Before we made our way through the rows of stalls-vegetables on one side, fruit on the other-the mazdoors would line up, chests puffed out, shoulders back to imply strength and stamina. In Urdu, a mazdoor is a young boy-probably homeless, possibly orphaned, certainly too poor to attend school-who works as a porter and makes money carrying groceries for wealthier patrons at the market. Past the mazdoors, the farmers sold their produce: lauqat, jaman, lychee, cheekoo, small sweet green sultana grapes; yams, gourds, arvi, and ruby red carrots. The pungent fragrance-a saccharine crushed guava underfoot, wilting greens, the rank damp shirts of farmers who awoke before dawn to haul their loads to town, potatoes with a film of dusty dried soil still clinging to them-made for an intoxicating perfume at once bodily and of the earth. I was supposed to dread these market runs, as all children and most adults did, but secretly I loved them. I followed my grandmother, sometimes pressed right up against her damp silk-draped frame-her sweet signature scent still discernible amid the odiferous hubbub-as she perused the bright stalls, surveying what she planned to purchase, sweat forming rivulets between her shoulder blades and at her temples, which, like all the other matrons, she dabbed with the corner of her dupatta. Who has the greenest beans? The snappiest okra? The onions have to be large but not too large, because those ones are the sweetest.
Produce was selected not just for its ripeness in the moment, but for its future perfection. Nano taught me to feel melons near their stems, that they should be heavier than they appear; to press pears gently; to smell mangos for sweetness to determine their readiness. Then came her masterful bargaining: first mild interest, then an ambivalent How much? No matter what price the vendor told her, it was always too much. Fifty rupees?! she scoffed with feigned horror. Your friend there just offered me the very same dates for forty rupees. I'll buy them from him. Then she turned gravely on her heel with dismissive finality, but every time, the vendor rushed to her, leaving his stall to block her path, a wagging head and smiling eyes offering her a nicer price. Wait, Baaji Malik, I'll match his price, but only for you, tell no one, and she'd give a barely perceptible nod to confirm her approval. At the market, my glamorous Nano was notorious and revered, and from her I learned how to shop-to select, to haggle-in that drenched tent, that humid carnival of perishables.
After the produce, trailed by a mazdoor who carried our haul in jute and plastic bags that Nano brought from home, we made our way to the meat market, where we chose our chickens from the specialized stalls that sold only chickens, and from its owner my grandmother once again tried to get the best possible deal. Nano signaled to the butcher which of the birds she wanted from the piled-up cages and he pulled each bird from its cage, rested its feathered neck on a wooden block held between his feet, and slit the chicken's throat. The blood-thick, crimson and clotted as fresh cream-gushed out into a waiting bucket, and then he tossed the bird, still pulsing, into a large industrial blue bin, lined with feathers and crusted gore of chickens that had come before, where it...
