Good news, readers: I have found my literary calling.
Ah, books about the service industry. When it employs so many people, how can there be so few good books about serving others? The back of the house has Kitchen Confidential, a
So here's the literary calling part: I am going to write a book about the front of the house which will actually be good. It will be full of bad behavior, questionable but artfully used profanity, and off-color jokes ("Does it have to have profanity?" my mother asked). The one shocking story in this book is so out of place and offensive that it seems completely artless. My book will be full of the same funny and sad stories we all see and tell each other every day. What it will not be full of is precious writing, and I won't go out of my way to make myself sound adorable and charming, which I'm not. I won't be smiling to the point of mandibular pain on the back of cover of the book. Agents and publishers, I will consider the first 100 offers.
So I think it's pretty apparent right off the bat how I felt about Service Included. First of all, there's the Pollyana, humorless writer (one gets the feeling that everything funny in the book was said by someone else, and stolen), who admits in the book that she is one of those people who must have everyone like her, and if they don't, she will try and try until they want to kill her. If I worked with this girl, I would make her cry within her first 4 days of work, no problem. That might make me sound mean, but then again, I also wouldn't make it my mission to steal her boyfriend. Basically, this girl has the perfect job to write a great memoir about waiting tables (captain at Per Se), and instead she spends all of it describing her affair with the restaurant's sommelier, whose girlfriend also works at the establishment. She is then surprised when the entire staff ends up hating her and the sommelier continuously cheats on her. We are supposed to think she is the hero. There's one line where, ostensibly thinking about the restaurant but clearly on her paramouric (it's a word; I just made it up) quarry, she says to herself "4 stars. Eyes on the prize." That is supposed to be love?
Damrosch is so self-absorbed that she cannot manage to capture a real sense of the other characters in her life – they are reduced to snarky qualities. There is the sarcastic sous chef who, not surprisingly, hates Phoebe as much as I do (much to her furrowed brow consternation, because she finds herself so darned cute & charming, how can anyone not like her) and one of the best scenes in the book is when the sous chef says to her "Phoebe, you're one of those people who has to have everything like you, aren't you?" When she affirms this, he says "I'm not" and turns his back to her. For that reason alone, I love this man. It is also clear that the author is the only important woman in her world. All other females are treated with disdain – very few are even given names. When the author and a few of her serving buddies decide to do a taste test of New York's marrow bones (oh! To have numerous options!), the one other female in the group is portrayed as whiny when, after 3 orders of marrow bones, she can't eat another bite of fat and is begging for something green. Listen here, Phoebe: there's a reason most people serve a bitter green salad along with marrow bones – to cut through the fat.
One obstacle when writing about oneself is trying not to indulge the side of you which would always make you seem cute and charming and fabulous. Consider this:
"We guzzled 20 different wines, pausing only briefly between each to consume vast quantities of aged cheddar and hard, salty crackers."
Vs.
"We savored each of the 20 wines the winery had to offer, shivering slightly in the early autumn morning breeze, wrapping our cashmere sweaters just a little closer, we swirled syrah and cabernet in our crystal and discussing the finer points of each – the notes of violet, of wood and earth, of tobacco leaves. To accompany, the finest cave-aged cheddar money could buy, crunchy with denatured protein crystals, with crackers as light and ethereal as the best cultured Vermont butter would allow."
Don't you kind of want to stab the second me? Just admit it. Maybe I'm just mean, but I deplore that second kind of precious writing. It always seems to come from a place of "look at what I could do that you couldn't." And furthermore, I wasn't wearing a cashmere sweater. And if I were, it would be full of moth holes, and I still wouldn't be able to let it go into the trash bin. I'm not ashamed of my frumpiness, and I never want to pretend to be something I'm not.
One obstacle in the book is a matter of conception: in choosing to write about her particular restaurant (because who doesn't want a behind-the-scenes look at Per Se), Damrosch is somewhat limited in her writing; if she dished everyone she worked with and for, they would hate her even more.
I never got the feeling that the writer understood the desirable nature of her job, or of the food she was serving. She rarely describes any of the dishes, and calls the house sorbets "whatever crazy concoction the pastry chefs thought up." In the first chapter, after she waits on Keller and his Sous Chef elect (in a different restaurant) and is challenged on the variety of persimmons being used, she goes into a little education about said fruits. I actually enjoyed that chapter, and was hoping the rest of the book followed a similar structure - a story about the restaurant, and then a little educational essay. My hopes were quickly dashed.
There are some interesting parts of the book - the brief and all too few glimpses we get into the service and philosophy behind a restaurant such as Per Se, the demands of the job, the fact that no one can use any scented products (something I agree with; anyone who's had a wine tasting ruined by someone's old lady perfume knows better than to ever wear heavily scented products to such events, or dinner). However, because this book is primarily a chick lit book (don't get me wrong, I do read some chick lit; I'm a girl, after all, and therefore am occasionally seduced by the pink cocktail/shoe covers), the four-star setting fades into the background of an uninspiring love story.
I am perhaps alone in my distaste for this book; it's just that I thought it could have been so much more than it was. If you still want to read it, there are no end of glowing reviews out there in the world, just Google it. If I didn't have the book on loan from a friend, I'd offer it to someone for free. I find that perhaps I am a little sexist in these sorts of memoirs - I also hated Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte, another love-story memoir written by a too-cute heroine who almost refuses a second date with a man because he ordered *gasp* a latte after dinner, when everyone knows a latte is a breakfast drink, and no one who's anyone would drink milk in their coffee after 10am. I suppose it depends on whose clock we're on, because I am enjoying a latte even as we speak, and it is noon, and breakfast. Oh, and for the record, I waited on an Italian chef last night who, after dinner, ordered a cappuccino. So take that. When Damrosch mentions Cooking for Mr. Latte, I almost fell out of my airplane seat, it was just too perfect. A match made in culinary purgatory.
