Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip--Confessions of a Cynical Waiter
Author: Steve Dublanica
FROM THE PRIZEWINNING BLOGGER OF WAITERRANT.NET, AN INSIDER'S HILARIOUS LOOK AT A WAITER'S LIFE AT AN UPSCALE NEW YORK-AREA RESTAURANT—KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL AT THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE.
According to The Waiter, eighty percent of customers are nice people just looking for something to eat. The remaining twenty percent, however, are socially maladjusted psychopaths. Waiter Rant offers the server's unique point of view, replete with tales of customer stupidity, arrogant misbehavior, and unseen bits of human grace transpiring in the most unlikely places. Through outrageous stories, The Waiter reveals the secrets to getting good service, proper tipping etiquette, and how to keep him from spitting in your food. The Waiter also shares his ongoing struggle, at age thirty-eight, to figure out if he can finally leave the first job at which he's truly thrived.
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
…amusing and informative…Waiter Rant is as delightful as it is irreverent.
Publishers Weekly
The anonymous restaurant professional behind the Bloggie Award—winning WaiterRant.net expands on his postings in his first book. The result is an enjoyable if utterly unromantic personal exposé on the inner workings of the New York City—area restaurants that have employed him since 1999. To his first job, the Waiter brought abandoned dreams and ambitions for a religious vocation, an eventual psychology degree and employment experiences in a drug-rehabilitation center. That history proved useful in professional service, particularly a restaurant that, with its corrupt manager and dictatorial boss and despite its upmarket setting, clientele and business volume, was an example of the very worst in the industry. The narrative hangs on the author's professional development from restaurant newbie to jaded industry-spokesperson; he makes ample room for extended riffs on manners, money, morals and even meals. He catalogues the grime-and-gross-out factors (some obscene), so comparisons to Kitchen Confidential are inevitable. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Sarah Statz Cords - Library Journal
These two working life memoirs seek to capitalize on the popularity of books like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential but fall somewhat short of the mark. Alexander, a former marine officer and advertising executive, left his high-powered career in his early forties owing to client-contact burnout to become a minimum-wage pizza delivery driver, ice cream scooper, medical tech, construction site cleanup guy, fast-food worker, and cowboy. While he describes the jobs adequately, at times even humorously, he offers no analysis of the experiment or descriptions of its impact on his financial bottom line. What final insights he does list are too specific to be broadly applicable (tip your pizza guy at least five bucks and be polite to ER staff); his closing recommendation to become a big fish in a little pond and find work as a consultant will be valuable only to other career executives who have built strong portfolios and contacts.
The Waiter (real name unknown) unfolds his story along more stereotypical memoir lines, mixing anecdotes from his near-decade of waiting tables with stories from his personal life. The author first found an audience at his blog WaiterRant.net, and although the book starts much too harshly (in tone and language), it eventually settles into an engaging and funny narrative that leaves the reader with a sense of the dignity that can be found in performing any job, even one as prone to customer abuse and lack of respect as food service. Alexander's title is not recommended, although a blurb from Stephen Colbert may deliver some readers; Waiter Rant is recommended for larger public libraries andthose seeking to add depth to their memoir collections.
Kirkus Reviews
A popular blogger offers behind-the-scenes tales about working the front of the house. After defecting from seminary and losing his subsequent job, the author took a temporary position as a server in an upscale New York restaurant. Six or seven years later, much to his own surprise, he was still waiting tables and anonymously recording his experiences at WaiterRant.net. In the casual, confessional tone of a seasoned blogger, The Waiter tells of corruption, intrigue, drug abuse, heated romance and of course tips, weaving it all into a humorously detailed memoir. Restaurant work can be emotionally toxic and brutalizing, he reveals. Living outside the nine-to-five world's boundaries warped and changed him and his fellow servers. Holidays became a source of stress, not joy, and accepting a friend's Friday night dinner invitation amounted to sacrificing hundreds of dollars in unearned pay. Worst of all were the bad customers, many of whom exhibited an astonishing level of self-absorption and entitlement. Required to endure abuse with a smile, many waiters unsurprisingly blew their night's tips on drinks after hours. Still, the life of a server wasn't all groveling and bingeing; some learned, as The Waiter did, to wield subtle, psychological control over even the most recalcitrant customers. He's good on psychological analysis too: His taxonomy of tippers comes complete with shrewd assessments of their various motivations, such as the mistaken assumption of "the verbal tipper" that heaping on praise will make up for a shoddy tip. The author began to relish the intimate glimpses he got into diners' personal lives, and underneath his hard-earned cynicism he seems justifiably proud of his progressin a difficult job. A heartfelt, irreverent look at the underbelly of fine dining.
BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking with over 200 Magnificent Recipes
Author: Shirley O Corriher
Great day in the morning, BakeWise is out! You are holding the book that everyone has been waiting for. Sure enough, Shirley did not hold back—it's all here. Lively and fascinating, BakeWise reads like a mystery novel as we follow sleuth Shirley while she solves everything from why cakes and muffins can be dry to génoise deflation and why the cookie crumbles.
With her years of experience from big-pot cooking for 140 teenage boys and her classic French culinary training to her work as a research biochemist at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Shirley manages to put two and two together in unique and exciting ways. Some information is straight out of Shirley's wildly connecting brain cells. She describes useful techniques, such as brushing puff pastry with ice water—not just brushing off the flour—making the puff pastry easier to roll. The result? Higher, lighter, and flakier pastry. And you won't find these recipes anywhere else, not even on the Internet. She can help you make moist cakes; flaky pie crusts; shrink-proof perfect meringues that won't leak but still cut like a dream; big, crisp cream puffs; amazing French pastries; light génoise; and crusty, incredibly flavorful, open-textured French breads, such as baguettes and fougasses.
There is simply no one like Shirley Corriher. People everywhere recognize her from her TV appearances on the Food Network and ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with Snoop Dogg as her fry chef.
Restaurant chefs and culinary students know her from their grease-splattered copies of CookWise, an encyclopedic work that has saved them from many a cooking disaster. With numerous "At-a-Glance"charts, BakeWise gives busy people information for quick problem solving. BakeWise also includes Shirley's "What This Recipe Shows" in every recipe. This section is science and culinary information that can apply to hundreds of recipes, not just the one in which it appears.
For years, food editors and writers have kept CookWise, Shirley's previous book, right by their computers. Now that spot they've been holding for BakeWise can be filled.
BakeWise does not have just a single source of knowledge; Shirley loves reading the works of chefs and other good cooks and shares their information with you, too. She applies not only her expertise but that of the many artisans she admires, such as famous French pastry chefs Gaston Lenôtre and Chef Roland Mesnier, the White House executive pastry chef for twenty-five years; Bruce Healy, author of Mastering the Art of French Pastry; and Bonnie Wagner, Shirley's daughter-inlaw's mother. Shirley also retrieves "lost arts" from experts of the past such as Monroe Boston Strause, the pie master of 1930s America. For one dish, she may give you techniques from three or four different chefs plus her own touch ofscience—"better baking through chemistry." She adds facts about the right temperature, the right mixing speed, and the right mixing time for the absolutely most stable egg foam, so you can create a light-as-air génoise every time.
BakeWise is for everyone. Some will read it for the adventure of problem solving with Shirley. Beginners can cook from it and know exactly what they are doing and why. Experienced bakers find out why the techniques they use work and also uncover amazing French pastries out of the past, such as Pont Neuf (a creation of puff pastry, pâte à choux, and pastry cream in honor of the Paris bridge) and Religieuses, adorable "little nuns" made of puff pastry filled with a satiny chocolate pastry cream and drizzled with mocha icing to form a nun's habit.
Some will want it simply for the recipes—incredibly moist whipped cream pound cake made with heavy cream whipped slightly beyond the soft-peak stage and folded into the batter; flourless fruit soufflés (puréed fruit and Italian meringue); Chocolate Crinkle Cookies, rolled first in granulated sugar and then in confectioners' sugar for a crunchy black-and-snow-white surface with a gooey, fudgy center. And Shirley's popovers are huge
Publishers Weekly
It's not surprising that James Beard Award-winner Corriher (CookWise) once worked as a chemist. Her no-nonsense approach to cakes, muffins, breads and cookies shows her deep knowledge and understanding that baking is, above all things, a science. This hefty collection of more than 200 recipes offers amateur and expert bakers alike clear, numbered steps and a plethora of information on ingredients, equipment and method. Invaluable troubleshooting sections solve pesky problems on everything from pale and crumbly cookies to fallen soufflés. With a sense of expertise and ease, the author showcases recipes from the basic (cherry pie, fudgy brownies, baguettes) to the more specialized Bordeaux Macadamia Crust and Bourbon Pecan Oatmeal Cookies, focusing on the reasons for each step (e.g., "using shortening limits the cookie's spread"). Astute references to a variety of chefs, cookbook authors and restaurants add a knowing punch to this solid collection that's sure to please bakers of all skill levels.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Judith Sutton - Library Journal
Corriher, trained as a research chemist, is well known as a culinary troubleshooter, and her first book, Cookwise, has become a standard reference. Ten years later, Bakewise expands on the baking information in that book (which does include sections on breads, piecrusts, cookies, and cakes) and goes beyond it, with the focus solely on baked goods, both savory and sweet. The cake chapter explores everything from the science behind different mixing methods to the acidity of cake ingredients to chocolate percentages. Each of the 200 recipes begins with a list of "What This Recipe Shows," and there are dozens of charts, boxes, and sidebars. The organization of the book sometimes seems confusing, and some home bakers will find the sheer bulk of the information overwhelming. However, those who are interested in the science of baking (and who like the Cook's Illustrated multiple-testing approach to recipes), as well as professionals in the field, will find Corriher's latest an invaluable resource.
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