Book Review: Somebody Feed Phil the Book by Phil Rosenthal
Release Date: October 18th, 2022
In the television show Somebody Feed Phil, Phil Rosenthal (creator of Everybody Loves Raymond) serves as a chipper guide through the sights and tastes of various global cities. It’s not as insightful or deep as something like Anthony Bourdain’s travel shows but it is much cheerier and a fine comfort watch. Rosenthal’s passion for travel and eating clearly comes through and he seems convinced he’s the luckiest guy on earth to get paid to do this. The new book companion to the show brings exactly the same energy. Somebody Feel Phil: The Book is a combination cookbook/coffee table book/memoir that should please big fans of the show with an interest in world cuisines.
The publisher actually only shared a sample (I believe the first third-ish of the book), but it was pretty easy to extrapolate from what I read. After a breezy introduction about Phil’s inspiration for the show, the book dedicates a chapter for each episode of the show so far.
Every chapter provides some show quotes, production details, and Phil’s general takeaways about the city and its food and people. As anyone who watched the show could probably predict, Phil is universally effusive with praise for basically all elements of the places he visits, especially the people. That’s his schtick and it’s never too tiring because the real stars of the book are its many recipes.
I came into the book expecting more of a travel memoir, and while you sorta get that, Somebody Feel Phil is more of a visually-pleasing cookbook. I’m not going to ding the book for being different from what I anticipated, especially given that the hardcopy seems to clearly suggest it’s a cookbook/coffee table kind of deal (i.e. the pages seem very big). Each chapter has about 3-4 recipes of dishes Phil had on his travels. Every recipe is written by an expert on the cuisine. The recipes are also often a bit off the beaten path, including khao soi (a Thai coconut curry soup), Pasteis de Nata (Portuguese puff pastry), and Braciola all’Arturo (Italian fried porkchop). The recipes are highly-detailed and feature a lot of tips for how to best replicate the flavors. I didn’t do any playing along at home and I’m not an expert on assessing cookbook recipes, but these seemed pretty well-done based on the detail. I think I could probably recreate at least some of these recipes even with my meager cooking abilities. My only nitpick is that I’d want some more substitution options knowing that some of the more specialty ingredients may be a bit hard to find.
There are also a ton of large and nice-looking photographs from the show’s production as well. These didn’t translate super-well on my Kindle but I looked at the full-color preview on Amazon and the book is jam-packed with a lot of photos, some vibrant, some majestic, some candid, all pretty amusing. But that is a watch-out with the electronic version. I’m not a big fan of reading recipes off my Kindle and the pictures are going to come through better in the hardcopy (the usual caveat for cookbooks, but worth reiterating here for those who expected more prose and fewer recipes).
Somebody Feel Phil: The Book is a bit hard to rate because I think it’s catering to a niche audience (fans of the show). But if you’ve read this far into the review then you probably count yourself as at least a moderate fan, and I think fans who enjoy cooking would get a lot out of this. The recipes are intriguing, diverse, and well-written and the reflective mini-essays from Phil about each episode are breezy and offer some interesting tidbits. I don’t think there is enough new non-recipe content to justify the price of admission for those strictly looking for a travel memoir, but if the whole package appeals to you I think it’s definitely worth picking up.
7/10