Christoph Ribbat

Well, this is a fascinating collection of restaurant history and trivia and anecdotes and social commentary on the role eating out has played in the world over history. Really, fascinating. And conveyed in short, easily palatable bursts. To me, it just felt like it wanted a really good wrap up at the end to pull it all together and that wasn't really present. Enjoyable, but also more atmospheric -- think short stories of history, not a through narrative.

Advanced reader's copy provided by Edelweiss.… (mehr)

There is an enormous amount of restaurant trivia collected in this book which is structured as a running series of stories and anecdotes collected from hundreds of sources. For the literary fan there are the stories of George Orwell's early days as a dishwasher drawn from "Down and Out in Paris and London", Ernest Hemingway's ideal café as described in "A Clean Well Lighted Place" and James Baldwin's integration battles at Woolworth's lunch counters drawn from "Notes of a Native Son."

For fans of chef & restaurant books there is everything from the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly" to the exclusive fly-in experience of dining at Magnus Nilsson's "Fäviken" in northern Sweden.

There are stories from very unique books such as Christophe Blain's non-fiction graphic novel In the "Kitchen With Alain Passard".

Most fascinating of all there are the stories of sociologists who studied both the chef/kitchen (the back of house) and the waiter/waitress (the front of house) experience, usually by going undercover and working full time for extended periods in those worlds. These range from a pioneering work by Frances Donovan in "The Woman Who Waits" from 1920 to Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America in 2001."

You are drawn in to keep reading as Ribbat structures his collage into short fragments from each larger tale with each segment often ending in a cliff-hanger for which you won't get the end of the story until several sections later. And you read on thinking there is going to be some sort of brilliant summing up of the experience at the end. It is the latter that is missing, so while all the trivia and anecdotes were fascinating the implied promised punch-line never seemed to arrive. But the journey was worth the voyage and there are references to a few dozen books that I'd likely want to read if I come across them. Which is why I wanted tag several of them above to remind me to find them later.

This was another in Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company's inaugural Year of Reading 2018 which is a 12 book subscription series selected and curated by its staff. I have been immensely pleased by the variety of it so far.… (mehr)