KEY POINTS:
Waiter Rant: Behind the Scenes of Eating Out
A. Waiter
(John Murray, $39.99)
We've been shown the inside of enough restaurant kitchens thanks to books such as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Bill Buford's diverting Heat and numerous reality TV shows. Now it's the turn of front-of-house staff to give an insider's view of restaurant life.
Waiter Rant was originally written as an anonymous blog (waiterrant.net). In book form it's made the New York Times best-seller list and is in the midst of spawning a follow-up and a TV series. So will it change the way you order? Well, maybe.
The thing it's important to remember is that A. Waiter (recently unmasked as Steve Dublanica) plied his trade in an upmarket New York restaurant (recently revealed to be the Lanterna Tuscan Bistro in Nyack). He spends a big chunk of the book being vitriolic about miserly tippers for good reason - most wait staff in the US pretty much live off their tips. In New York they're paid well below minimum wage and share a percentage of their tips with busboys and bartenders. So fail to give them their 15 per cent and they'll do their best to get back at you - whether that means ruining your chances with your date, screwing up your business deal or spitting in your fettucine (yes, it does happen).
A. Waiter also served meals to a particular breed of rich, spoilt New Yorker. There's the woman who creates a fuss about the hair in her food - which turns out to be her own. And the diners who throw a tantrum when they're not seated where they want - even though they're aware paramedics are in the restaurant trying to revive a stroke victim.
Between gleeful descriptions of such episodes, there's a lot of thoughtful stuff about the peculiar half-life of the professional waiter. The antisocial hours, the camaraderie, the rivalries and the sense that many of them are "sitting on life's fence and trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up". He describes waiting tables as having a "crack-cocaine" quality to it and the restaurant business as attracting "train wreck personalities", and shows us the dramas bubbling under the service while we're trying to decide between the eggs benedict and the caesar salad.
This is an honest book, sad as often as it is funny, and philosophical at times. It might change the way you act in restaurants - or you may just decide to stay home and serve yourself.
- Detours, HoS
