What a tale of the restaurant world! Not sure how folks survive with all the debauchery going on from start to after finish in a day/night working at the restaurant. I love good service and I think it is important to pay for it. All the employee money and time spent on drugs, sex and alcohol while working was almost too much to keep reading about. ( )
Interesting look at the world of Restaurants and Service in New York over the past 35 years. This book should come with a warning for readers who might find the constant foul language offensive. This book contains way too much sex, drugs and plain obscenity! ( )
I struggled with this book -- I love cooking memoirs and I could not figure out why I hated this book so much until my partner pointed out that the difference here is that this book is about front of house. Yep. That's it. I love reading about food -- about preparing it, growing it, choosing it, eating it. This book is not about food. Not even a little bit. It's about celebrity restaurant culture and the love-hate relationship of grueling hours of service. It's also primarily set in the 80's, which is not a decade I care to revisit. I genuinely don't care about the culture of tipping/bribing the maitre d'. I don't care about name dropping. I don't care about drugs and drinking and all the crappy things that make up a typical experience with the public. I don't find the idea of people screwing behind counters and in bathrooms at all appealing. So yeah, really not my cup of tea in so many ways, especially the unapologetically chauvinistic and abusive culture of the timeframe this book is centered on.
That said, I think this writer is a pretty fascinating guy -- because for all of the above, he's also someone who's seen a ton of change and growth in the industry and by and large celebrates how its moved away from toxic culture. He sells lots of tables and celebrates the obscenely wealthy who bought them, but also flat out says that this is not what a maitre d' should do, and not an example of what good service should be and that inner conflict is really interesting. Also, he talks a lot about the impact of the AIDS epidemic on restaurant staff in NYC in the 80s and that is deeply moving. Not an easy read, but a very interesting one.
From the moment I trained as a waiter (we'd yet been neutered into servers), inexperienced, eager, and excited, I fell in love with the restaurant business.
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