If this season of Top Chef has taught you anything, it’s that you could totally do the restaurant thing.

Really. A champion restaurant-goer and menu-dissector like you? How hard could it be to dice shallots and coordinate eight hot entrees?

Bill Buford, former literary editor at The New Yorker, decided to find out. So he slaved himself out to the kitchen at Babbo. (New Yorker editors don’t do modest gestures.)

Heat is the just-published chronicle of his adventures in chopping. And chopping until his blisters bled. Whereupon he realized that if he really wanted to understand restaurants, kitchens, and how a chef thinks, he’d have to return to Mario’s roots. Buford’s picaresque journey led him to London, where he met bad-boy chef Marco Pierre White, and Tuscany, where he apprenticed with a Dante-quoting butcher.

A warning to anyone who’s ever fantasized about quitting the law firm and enrolling at The French Culinary Institute: The truth behind the swinging doors isn’t pretty.

But for everyone who thinks the best times start with “so where should we go to dinner?” Heat is a mouth-watering treat.

Available online at amazon.com.