Kitchen Con: Writing On The Restaurant Racket - Softcover

Trevor-white

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845962206 ISBN 13: 9781845962203

Publisher: Mainstream Publishing, 2006

Synopsis

Trevor White's hilarious account of life as a restaurant critic is also a social history of restaurant criticism and an exposé of the restaurant business. The author reveals how diners are routinely ripped off by self-styled artists and greedy restaurateurs, while arguing that anyone can become a food critic - all you need is a pen and an appetite.This defiantly populist critique of restaurant culture redefines the dining room as a place in which humans can be greatly satisfied, rather than an artist's studio. From the world's first restaurant to the most fashionable kitchens of London, Paris and New York, Kitchen Con is a book-length tribute to dinner but also a scathing attack on gourmet dogma.Written with style, humour and breathtaking candour, Kitchen Con lifts the lid on the culinary cartel in a whirlwind tour of the world's great restaurants, before turning its attention to the greatest con of the author himself. No one is spared in this riveting tale of life at the heart of the restaurant racket.

About this title

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.”

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."

Edition details

• Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1845962206
• ISBN 13: 9781845962203
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272