Considering whether he will accompany his employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to America, a personal cook remembers his youth in French-colonized Vietnam and his days cooking for the doyennes of the Lost Generation.

"Stein's most famous work; one of the richest and most irreverent biographies ever written, now illustrated by Maira Kalman"--

Jazz-age Paris was the center of the artistic and literary world, and the center of the center was Gertrude Stein's salon, where the famous and aspiring creative talents gathered to gawk at Stein's Picassos and vie for status. Young Midwesterner Ida Caine arrives in Paris with her husband Teddy, a would-be Hemingway who thinks he can adventure first and write later. When Teddy falls in with the Stein set, he brings Ida to the salon, where she is shunted...