Learn to cook if you like to cook. Learn to COOK :: Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter

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Learn to COOK - Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter

List Price: $24.95
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Manufacturer: William Morrow

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 647.95092
Format: Bargain Price
Label: William Morrow
Manufacturer: William Morrow
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 2007-10-01
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: 2007-09-25
Studio: William Morrow

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Editorial Reviews:

Kitchen Confidential meets Sex and the City in this delicious, behind-the-scenes memoir from the first female captain at one of New York City's most prestigious restaurants

While Phoebe Damrosch was figuring out what to do with her life, she supported herself by working as a waiter. Before long she was a captain at the New York City four-star restaurant Per Se, the culinary creation of master chef Thomas Keller.

Service Included is the story of her experiences there: her obsession with food, her love affair with a sommelier, and her observations of the highly competitive and frenetic world of fine dining.

She also provides the following dining tips:

Please do not ask your waiter what else he or she does.

Please do not steal your waiter's pen.

Please do not say you're allergic when you don't like something.

Please do not send something back after eating most of it.

Please do not make faces or gagging noises when hearing the specials—someone else at the table might like to order one of them.

After reading this book, diners will never sit down at a restaurant table the same way again.

Spotlight customer reviews:

Customer Rating:

Summary: Precision becomes art
Comment: Despite the sex drugs and rock & roll touched on this is on balance a dining procedural. It is very very good if you want an insiders look at what makes for great dining experiences. It also conveys a lot about what it is to be part of the service staff in a restaurant. It also is great for those of us who love New York city. My sister, who has worked all her life in that enviroment, read it in one sitting and found it quite the best book on the topic ever.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Not really what the title suggests
Comment: Billed as a front of the house "kitchen confidential" but sadly it was not at all. Mildy interesting but without any of the juice that was promised. Not recommended by me.

Customer Rating:

Summary: not what I expected
Comment: ok i got this book becauce of the place the author worked and the chef she worked for. What I got was a book more about here personal love life which in the brief time she worked there was sev diff coworkers including a secret relationship with a managerial level employee. SO the amount of the book devoted to the chef and the restaurant itself was less than I desired. Her employer Per Se also is one of the first places in the States to charge a service charge on all purchases which the author's tale ends just before its implemented which is also something I wanted to see details on in the book. Sadly the author quits to avoid the loss of income this would entail. It was interesting to learn the chef did this to equalize the kitchen pay to the servers wages. Personally I assumed a place of such caliber would pay well above the standard wages but mind you the servers were probably clearing low 5 figures when they were being tipped.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Gave up on it
Comment: I couldn't even make it as far as the romantic part. I suspect the problem lay with the nature of her restaurant; rich people overpaying "to be seen" doesn't do it for me.

Customer Rating:

Summary: More inside a love life than inside a restaurant
Comment: I really wanted to like this book--and this author. But what started out promisingly ultimately fell flat into a heap of 'who cares about your personal relationship with the sommelier?'. The insight gleaned didn't feel revealing (as the book was so hyped to do) and I ended up actually _disliking_ the author by the end, who, in turns, came across as smug, condescending and even small. I wanted this to be a book I was glad to have in hardcover. Instead I'm just left regretting I dropped the cash and didn't read the Amazon reviews beforehand (instead of just the critics'). At the risk of being cast out of some community, I FAR preferred Amanda Hesser's book about her latte-loving boyfriend to this one, which ended up being, in my mind, a book about Phoebe Damrosch's wine-loving one.

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