Kitchen Con: Writing on the Restaurant Racket - Hardcover

White, Trevor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470840854 ISBN 13: 9780470840856

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 2007

Synopsis

"The difference between Gordon Ramsay and a talking pig is that Gordon Ramsay never shuts up."
—From Kitchen Con

Our consumer culture can’t help but get wrapped up in designer crazes— these days our collective attention is focused on the designer food frenzy. Chefs are our newest celebrities and their restaurants are their stages, but hidden behind the elegant façade of fine dining exists the stark and sometimes shocking reality of the food industry.

Renowned food critic Trevor White exposes what goes on behind the scenes in the high-stakes world of the restaurateur. Diners, be forewarned: this biting critique of restaurant culture shows today’s most celebrated restaurants for what they really are: greedy, ostentatious businesses solely dedicated to the fame of their owners.

Kitchen Con pays tribute to the history of dining out, starting with the first restaurants and moving on to the most fashionable and well-known kitchens in New York, Paris and London. Witty, humourous and polished, White takes his reader on a whirlwind trip through the restaurant racket, sparing no one!

About this title

About the Author

Trevor White is your classic bourgeois loser who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Forrest Gump meets Chocolate Factory Charlie, he parlayed a slight connection with food into a successful career as a restaurant critic in the great cities of the world, before returning to Dublin, where he now publishes the best-selling restaurant guide in Ireland.

From the Back Cover

"Is it safe to eat vegetarians? Why are waiters like cocaine dealers? Is it lawful to leave a restaurant without paying? How can we feast while half the world starves? And how can anyone get a table tonight in Europe's most fashionable restaurant? To answer these questions, join me for dinner in London, Paris and New York. Along the way, we shall meet great guardians of gastronomy, each choking on a slab of foie gras. A few may survive, but it won't be pretty—and where we're going, those Michelin stars mean nothing. It's not that sort of place. Welcome to the 21st-Century Dining Room."

From the Inside Flap

A DELIGHTFULLY SCATHING AND HILARIOUS EXPOSÉ on the ever-more-outrageous restaurant racket. Pull up a chair with food critic Trevor White at the most sought-after restaurants on the planet, where salmonella and staggering prices abound. “Some restaurants are owned by thieves. Others are staffed by the criminally insane. All are reviewed by the sort of people who believe that no good meal is complete without a sorbet to cleanse the palate, and that Michelin stars keep the sky from falling down.”

Intelligent, witty and dry to the bone, Kitchen Con is not merely a memoir, or a scant polemic about well-known culinary egomaniacs. It is a gastronomic road-trip of global proportions, where snail porridge, food rage, rebukes, rebuttals, social oneupmanship and ingenious plots for revenge compete for the attention of Ireland’s most notorious restaurant critic. And no one is spared. “Restaurant critics are like very bad lovers. They only come once a year, they don’t care if you’re not ready, they leave without saying a word and then they tell everyone what you did wrong.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470840854
• ISBN 13: 9780470840856
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272