THERE IS A LONG AND NOBLE tradition of books that dish the dirt on the restaurant business. In the 1940s, Ludwig Bemelmans wrote a brilliant waiter's memoir called Hotel Splendide, and Idwal Jones wrote High Bonnet, which did the same job for the wo
rld of chefs. Thereafter the niche market in catering memoirs bubbled along happily; Nicholas Freeling wrote two books in the 1970s – The Cook and The Kitchen – before Anthony Bourdain managed to combine something of them all in his runaway bestseller Kitchen Confidential.
Then Hotel Babylon (which also owes much to Bemelmans) made it from the fiction shelves to the television screen and it became inevitable that soon someone else would have a go. In a thoroughly modern fashion, Waiter Rant – Behind the Scenes of Eating Out by A Waiter started life as a blog with an anonymous author. As a read, this book lollops along, feeding you nuggets of supposedly insider information about life as a waiter; its great weakness is that it reads like a blog with literary pretensions.
The author, Mr Waiter, uses some very irritating words and appears to favour the George Bush presidential dictionary. Faults are "remediated"; someone who makes a fuss when finding a hair in her food is "trichotillomaniac"; at one point, while pondering the lot of a waiter, he writes: "I think I'm especially attenuated to what's going on around me"; a fellow waiter has an "eremitical" existence. Good writing is the art of trying to say things simply; Mr Waiter is foolish to adopt the reverse strategy.
The role of the waiter is a bit more melodramatic in the United States than in the UK because American waiters live off their tips. All those stories of angry young women chasing bemused Europeans down the street after they have ambled out of a restaurant presuming that "servis compris" was the order of the day are true. In America you leave 20 per cent minimum, and if you don't, you run the risk of being pilloried on a website like www.waiterrant.net
This book touches all the same bases as Anthony Bourdain – drink, drugs, sex, hygiene, sentimentality, sleep deprivation – but you get the sense that it is all done dutifully in search of headlines, and you never really empathise with the main protagonist. Do you believe that dissolute waiters make a point of farting silently at the tables of customers they dislike and then slip away leaving the diners to choke? Such whimsy and tall tales make for a very successful and light-hearted blog, but spinning them out into a satisfying book is well nigh impossible, as this effort proves.
The full article contains 461 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
