“A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France”
A book presentation by Steve Hoffman with special guest vincent francoual
Join us at the Alliance for a presentation of Steve Hoffman’s first book: “A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France”. The author will be discussing the inspiration, journey, and insights behind his latest work.
This presentation will be followed by a discussion with French chef Vincent Francoual.
The book will be available for purchase in La Boutique.
In this poignant, delicious memoir, American tax preparer and food writer Steve Hoffman tells the story of how he and his family move to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about food, wine, and learning how to belong.
Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the café and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, it’s getting into fights with your wife because you won’t break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away.
But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker’s apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he’d held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.
About Steve Hoffman
Steve Hoffman is a Minnesota tax preparer and food writer. When he dies, the tax-preparer-food-writer industry will die with him. He is a French speaker and shameless Francophile. His writing has won multiple awards, including the 2019 James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. He has been published in Food & Wine, The Washington Post, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Artful Living magazine. His first book, A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France, will be published in July 2024, edited by Francis Lam. It is the story of his family's gradual (then precipitous) acceptance into a tiny Languedoc winemaking village, of his bottom-up education in Mediterranean food and wine, and of a hard-won self-acceptance in mid-life.
About Vincent Francoual
Chef Vincent Francoual’s journey in fine dining started when he was a teen in France and began working in kitchens in France and Italy. He landed a dream job at Le Bernardin, a four-star New York City French seafood restaurant, before moving to the Twin Cities as a chef at Un Deux Trois in downtown Minneapolis. He recently created Chloe by Vincent, a new casual French restaurant in Downtown Minneapolis.
This event is free with a $10 suggested donation to support our cultural programs. Merci pour votre soutien !
With the support of :
