Book review: WAITER RANT: BEHIND THE SCENES OF EATING OUT

by "A Waiter"

John Murray, £12.99

WHERE do you start with a book that you dislike so profoundly that reading it is only marginally less enjoyable than having your root canal drilled? What to say about a tome which, from its whingeing opening to its whining finale, made me want to track down its anonymous American protagonist and throttle him. How could anyone pack in so much anger, contempt, self-pity and intellectual hubris into one personality?

I have worked as a waiter and have enormous sympathy for a group of people who do a trying job for low wages and little or no thanks. While I recognise his portrait of the finger-snapping, low-tipping, patronising morons who he reckons constitute 20% of his customers, the author is equally unappealing. But rather than learning from his most noxious customers, he seems determined to emulate their sneeringly objectionable behaviour. Meet the restaurant world's Patty Hearst.

I also simply don't believe a good proportion of this truly objectionable narrator's guff. Is it really true that many of his colleagues react to objectionable customers by dropping what my kids refer to as "silent but deadlies" next to their table before beating a smirking retreat? Of course not. Once suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite for a diary-style book, the author's credibility is irretrievably compromised.

The author, who writes one of the two most successful and entertaining waiter blogs (the other is stainedapron.com), has stretched his tales and anecdotes to breaking point. Some blogs make good books: this isn't one of them.

There is a long tradition of books providing insight into the restaurant world's seedy underbelly.

Waiter Rant reads like its author has speed-read all the available classics and distilled every facet that made them bestsellers. Drink and drugs? Yep, ticked that box. Sex and peeing in customers' wine? Yep, ticked that too. He doesn't even do writing by numbers competently, thanks to a pretentiously convoluted use of language: a customer isn't pulling-her-hair-out angry but "trichotillomaniac"; a fellow waiter isn't reclusive but "eremitical"; A Waiter doesn't redress faults, he "remediates" them. Me? I'm just left feeling a little ennuiated by it all.