In 2021 he released Taste gooda memoir that was more about family dinners than industry drama. Now, in What I ate in a yearTucci limits his scope to recording diary entries for a year. The collective product is equal parts public memoir, personal diary, and occasional cookbook—supplemented with a few poems in the margins.

Tucci begins the year in Rome on the set of conclave. He feels almost at home in Italy, as you would expect from someone whose hit show bears the title Stanley Tucci: Looking for Italy. With weeks of restaurant recommendations in the Eternal City, the book could justify its cover price as a travel guide. The intrigue of many days begins and ends with diet, as Tucci takes his own lunch to a film set while filming in Italy (Italian studio catering is “terrible…disgusting, even”) and waxes poetic about the virtue of soup (” it “comforts, it soothes, it refreshes, it restores – soup is life in a pot”).

As a magazine, it ostensibly focuses on Tucci’s passion for food and drink. But he is a man of many passions, and he can hardly talk about one without triggering another. Not only does Tucci admire Rome’s architecture, he also talks about the little boy who was reportedly moved to tears when he saw the Pantheon because it was “so perfect.” He doesn’t just enjoy eggs for breakfast either – they’re “always on my mind” and “practically the perfect food” (even more so if you follow his advice and watch a video of Jacques Pepin making them).

By spending a year with his reader, Tucci builds a personal intimacy that allows his inner life to unfold on the page over time. As the months pass, food becomes a simple pleasure, a recurring staple, an excuse to reconnect with friends and make memories with family. Using meals as a narrative device gives celebrity voyeurism a grounded sensibility that would otherwise be at home Page six. Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively come over for dinner, but the real story is how they made chicken cutlets that the kids loved. Family vacations would be normal, except the in-laws are John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. Harry Styles occasionally stops by for dinner and earns the description of a fine young man that any grandparent would be proud of. Guy Ritchie sounds like a Bond villain, dedicated to the culinary side and equipped with an army of Range Rovers to guard his sprawling British estate.

If the daily cycles of pasta and marinara sauce, savory pastries and orecchiette with sausage and broccoli leave a lasting impression on his audience, that might be motivation to actually cook. And cook often enough to develop a feel for it. In the Tucci household, meals often start with leftover vegetables or frozen sauces, but can evolve into something beautiful.

To be fair, the results are not consistent. Tucci and his wife seem almost distraught as they cook scallops in a pan that is too cold to sear properly. He blames himself for not pureeing the vegetables in his soup enough. His reviews of disappointing restaurants are even more scathing, brimming with resentment over wasted money (and, more importantly, time). Even then, his sense of propriety forces restraint. Restaurants and chefs he loves are praised loudly and by name. Subpar businesses are treated brutally, but without proper names and with descriptions too vague for Google or demolition.

Despite the casual tone of pasta lunches and celebrity dinner parties, Tucci’s restless inner monologue never allows the weeks to become lackluster. Like Marcus Aurelius, a Roman long before the age of pasta, human mortality weighs heavily on Tucci. Since he lives in London, he can estimate how often he will see American friends again before they die. He is 64 but has small children. He builds a life in England with his wife of 12 years, but he can never fully escape his New York home, where he raised a family and where cancer claimed the life of his first wife . He won his own battle with cancer, although it resulted in reduced saliva production that limited his ability to enjoy rich meats.

Lost in his own thoughts, he admits that he is more attracted to the past than the future. That seems only fitting for the man who insists on proper pre-dinner cocktail hours for guests and who today complains about T-shirts and streetwear in a tone that sounds more familiar to George F. Will than a Hollywood actor.

Ultimately, a man’s diary is only as interesting as the man himself. And that interest is entirely subjective. No one can convince me to care about what most celebrities eat or think on any given day. But it seems like a fair number of people are interested in hearing from Stanley Tucci. Among them was the bartender from Manhattan who saw me reading this book with his face on the cover and was full of questions. She didn’t care about how to make pasta, but she did care about getting inside his head. “He seems to have depth,” she said.

Any reader of this book will agree.

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Will Simpson is a lawyer in New York.