Like everyone else, writers are obsessed with food. Mostly,
that obsession takes the form of food writing, which is a tricky
business. It’s easy to hyperbolize or get dangerously close to
whimsical when you’re relating the pleasures of eating.
Many writers have gone crazy writing about food: Isabel Allende
famously posed topless, her breasts covered by an immense bowl of
berries, for the back cover of Aphrodite: A Memoir of the
Senses, which features an uncomfortable passage about food’s
inherent eroticism. Joanne Harris, too, has made a career out of
writing bad novels about the sensuality of eating, and Jim Harrison
plastered his highly unappetizing mug on the cover of The Raw and
Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand.
Fewer authors have ventured into restaurant kitchens to relate
sordid back-room details. George Orwell shares his experiences
dishwashing in the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and
London, and he milks the job for all its potent class issues. Much
more recently, zine auteur Dishwasher Pete published Dishwasher,
a memoir about his quest to wash dishes in all 50 states.
Beyond that, though, there’s tough-guy chef Anthony Bourdain and, as
of last month, Phoebe Damrosch, with her intriguingly titled Service
Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter.
Unfortunately, her exploits waiting tables at Per Se, the prestigious
New York branch of the French Laundry restaurant, are nowhere near as
titillating as the jacket copy promises.
Damrosch seems unwilling to make any enemies, and so her famous
clients go unnamed and the disgusting realities of a four-star kitchen
remain unrevealed. Instead, she tells us all about her fabulously
uninteresting love life.
For real detail about what goes on in real kitchens, turn instead to
Last Night at the Lobster, a novel by Stewart O’Nan. It’s the
story of a manager at a Red Lobster that’s being closed by corporate
headquarters. He’s got to convince his staff to pretend to care through one final shift.
It’s hard to recall the last time a novelist gave a normal person
with a normal job such dignity. From the thawing out of frozen soups in
the dishwasher to the cleaning up of children’s vomit, O’Nan’s
fascination with the mechanics of a chain restaurant make this one of
the more compelling books of the year. This attention to detail makes
the drama of running a kitchen—which is, as everyone who’s worked
in a restaurant knows, dirty work potholed with tempests of
aggression—as solid and meaningful as most food writing is
flouncy and artificial. 