Kitchen Confidential (Updated Edition) by Anthony Bourdain
2007, Harper Perennial; 312 pages; $14.95
Waiter Rant by The Waiter, Steve Dublanica
2008, HarperCollins; 302 pages; $26.95
Mr. Bourdain’s bittersweet tale of being a chef rippled through the mass media in 2000 when it was first published. The candid account of his 25-plus years in the culinary industry outraged some (mostly restaurant owners), delighted some (mostly culinary professionals), and shocked many (the public).
Mr. Bourdain discovered his passion for food when he was ten, while on a family vacation to France. He stumbled into the restaurant business when he took a job as a dishwasher in Provincetown during his college years. This was when he discovered the dysfunctional yet fascinating world of the culinary profession. The eye-opening experience as a novice cook introduced him to the world of booze, drugs, power, and money. He knew by then there was no turning back.
Mr. Bourdain’s tales are candid and raw. He starts as a ruthless punk and finishes as a professional chef. How the 25-plus years have changed him is remarkable, although Mr. Bourdain rarely dwells on retrospective analysis . Rather, he relies on his stories to lead the way.
In a mere 300-some pages, Mr. Bourdain explains why readers should not order seafood on Mondays, why so many restaurants fail, why good cooking is not about creativity, how to get professional-grade cookware cheap, and how he keeps on top of things via his private intelligence network. As a result, his narrative is sometimes choppy.
Mr. Dublanica, a.k.a. The Waiter, dishes out his take on life as a professional waiter. After hitting rock bottom in his personal life and finding himself on the brink of a breakdown, he started working as a waiter so he could sort things out . Several years later, his supposedly temporary gig slowly solidified into a permanent profession. He started to write down his observations and thoughts on his blog in 2005. Soon the popularity of the blog grew, and it gave birth to the book Waiter Rant.
Since Mr. Dublanica has worked in the industry for a shorter period than Mr. Bourdain, his book’s contents are notably thinner than those of Kitchen Confidential.
As the title suggests, Mr. Dublanica mostly rants. He rants about the dysfunctional work environment, the misfit workers, the paranoid owners, the lousy tippers, the holiday horrors, the good (or bad) money, and the madness of a waiter’s life.
The first half of the book is devoted to exposing the ugliness and the craziness of the restaurant industry. In his own words, waiters today are expected to be “food allergy specialists, sommeliers, cell-phone-rule enforcers, emergency medical technicians, bouncers, receptionists, joke tellers, therapists, linguists, punch bags, psychics, protocol specialists, and amateur chefs.”
As his journey progresses, Mr. Dublanica realizes that he is also supposed to know how to fix air conditioners, find a bottle of replacement wine within ten minutes, stop customers from having sex in the washroom, cut drunk patrons off, and wring tips out of cheap guests. The tales are arranged into a fictional year, from New Year’s Eve to Valentine’s Day and then on to Mother’s Day, the 4th of July, Labour Day, and Thanksgiving.
As time goes by, fewer and fewer facts are presented and more and more personal reflections are added to the mix. Money, power, alcohol, and stress gradually overtax him until Mr. Dublanica is desperate to get out of the waiter’s life. Only after he quits his job as headwaiter does he realize that perhaps it is possible to find inner peace by starting all over again.
Mr. Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential is heavy on factual content while the narrative is sometimes disrupted. Mr. Dublanica’s Waiter Rant delivers his waiter’s perspective cynically yet in a way we can all relate to. The two books in essence describe a dysfunctional industry behind the scenes, full of misfits and addicts, that is rarely seen by the public.
For more information:
Visist The Waiter’s blog at http://www.waiterrant.net
