Reading Journal 2023: Black, White, and The Grey: The story of an Unexpected Frienship an a Beloved Restaurant.

Reading Journal 2023: Black, White, and The Grey: The story of an Unexpected Frienship an a Beloved Restaurant.

I had no idea what to expect when I picked thiis one up. I was inspired to do some after my recent trip to Savannah. Black, White and the Grey tells the story of a white investor an black chef whom embark on an experiment to open up a now famed restaurant in the south. As the subtitle reads, its “the story of an unexpected friendship and a beloved restaurant” called the Grey.

What was so suprising about this book, in a good way, was the way it writes itself warts and all. Half the fascination here is the details we get about the actual construction of this book. Yes, the book is about race, and yes it is about the ways in which race matters. But this was the furthest thing you could get from a story about two different skin colors coming together and proving it doesn’t matter and that we are all one. This is about two embattled people whom get to the end of their story, at least the part contained in these pages, and realize they are still world’s apart from understanding each others experiences. At the same time, the construction of the book becomes a case study in itself for how writing a book in the world today, even together, still marginalizes the black voice, even when it arrives with the best intentions. What we get in this final product is the white voice in regular print, and then the black voice in bold, telling two sides of the same story, sometimes in direct conflict. Its that sort of honest approach that endears this as a biography. We get the ignorance, the fighting, the tension, and we also get the beauty, commitment and growth, both to each other and to a restaurant.

That’s the backdrop of course to the other element of this book- southern food. That conversation in and of itself, and the richly detailed descriptive and background to it, was equally fascinating.