The Readable Feast: On Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter

Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter
by Phoebe Damrosch

This month, as summer draws its last breath, we're taking a little detour in our recommended reading. Cooking is the focus of our title, but there will be no recipes; high-quality ingredients are key, but there are no featured dishes; and there are definitely rules and even rights, but no culinary theory or technique will be taught. Rather, we offer you our favorite summer reading title for those last few long warm days, a book that will send you on a journey behind doors through which very few have traveled. And what, you might ask, represents for us the quintessential read-on-the-deck-with-a-glass-of-wine book? Phoebe Damrosch's laugh-out-loud, insightful, and often eye-opening Service Included, the story of her experiences as a member of the wait staff at chef Thomas Keller's renowned restaurant Per Se.

Damrosch's story begins as a great many do whose authors are intimately involved with the restaurant industry: An aspiring artist (a.k.a. English major) enduring the requisite heartbreak story consequently writes bad poetry, dashes off on a trip to anywhere (in this case, Paris), and realizes along the way that only great food cures all ills. Capped off by the artist's nagging need for rent money, this age-old story has continually supplied the staffs of the restaurants of the world. Upon her return from France, armed with little or no experience, but a healthy infatuation with Keller's restaurant French Laundry, Damrosch applies for, and gets a position at, the then newly established Per Se, and the journey unfolds.

The dining experience at Per Se is supposedly one to behold—I've personally never had the pleasure, but have heard stories from friends that made me green with jealousy. Items like potage parmentier and salmon cornets are par for the course, potentially served among seven (!) canapés, ranging from the signature Oyster and Pearls to a "Pop-Tart" filled with a marmalade of Perigord truffles and drizzled with truffle frosting. And that's just the appetizer course! Yes, this is over-the-top dining at its best (I had to look up "parmentier" in about three different places), and while eating such gustatory delights may be daunting, working in the restaurant where such things as savory sorbets are second nature can be downright scary. As Damrosch highlights, there are the tests:

"Questions ranged from the difference between black and summer truffles, the grape in Vouvray, whether we brown the bones for veal stock, the definition of glacage, and my favorite, which I still can't answer: 'Circle the correct ONE: Cippolini, Cipolini, Cipollini, Cipolinni.' I got every one of the above wrong, but that last one was a cruel and unusual question, so it doesn't count."

There are the diners:

"...Across the dining room sat the middle-aged man who refused to eat his vegetables, the woman who claimed to be allergic to anything too fishy, the food-phobic woman who started hyperventilating when she looked at the menu, the anorexic who spat all her food into the napkin that she shoved in a backpack under the table, the macho man who laughed at the portion size and demanded a few more meat courses before cheese, or the woman who became teary at the thought of eating anything on her personal 'cute' list, an arbitrary list of mammals."

And there are the philosophical questions of food that become inescapable when working within the fine-dining industry:

"I will agree that on the one hand, obsessive attention to dining, ingredients, flavor combinations, and food politics does reflect excessive time and resources in a status-obsessed society. On the other hand, many of our children think chickens have fingers. Is a tasting menu more extreme than artery-clogging, diabetes-inducing fast 'food' we barely taste as we're careening down the highway doing eighty?"

Damrosch provides a truly unique experience—a simultaneously light-hearted and personal look behind the scenes at one of culinary society's best-kept secrets: the elusive four-star restaurant. Her tone is irreverent but respectful, honest and passionate. If you don't have plans to go to Per Se, or French Laundry, or even that lovely little restaurant in your neighborhood that you've had your eye on for a while but just haven't gotten around to calling, you must peruse Service Included. You'll be transported on a remarkably enjoyable tour of the dining room, behind the kitchen doors, through the restaurant world and beyond. Damrosch feels like a new friend by the end of the read, and you'll be better for her company. Plus, she provides us with one of the most important pieces of literature I've read in quite some time—the "Diner's Bill of Rights":

1. The right to have your reservation honored
2. The right to water
3. The right to the food you ordered at the temperature the chef intended
4. The right to a clean, working bathroom
5. The right to clean flatware, glassware, china, linen, tables and napkins
6. The right to enough light to read your menu
7. The right to hear your dining companions when they speak
8. The right to be served until the restaurant's advertised closing time
9. The right to stay at your table as long as you like
10. The right to salt and pepper.