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SERVICE INCLUDED From Proust’s eternal madelines to the latest advertising tout, food and love have proved an irresistible combination. Food is family interactions; food is a metaphor for seduction; food is jealousy; food explains the relationships with those who are likely to be our fate and our doom. On a plate, in a bowl or mug: food represents our place in life. Faced with hungry guests and our own growling stomach, we stand in the area designated “kitchen” or haul out the yellow pages, and wonder what we can produce, both from the cupboards of our backgrounds, our telephone, and our souls. In Service Included, Phoebe Damrosch produces a combination guide to one-of-the-best-restaurants-in-New-York, a behind the swinging door tell-mostly-all, and a retrospective of her life through food service with advice to the restaurant patron included at no extra gratuity. It’s a set of goals worthy of wikipedia, The World Book with its mostly inedible thistle on the spines, and human life. To a point she succeeds. In a book patterned after the tasting menu that Per Se diners are subtly encouraged to choose, Damrosch serves her reader the off-hours family meals and bone marrow evaluation junket to other restaurants, staff liaisons, family upheavals, short and long term lovers, and advice when dining in upscale restaurants. Like the quail eggs Chef Kenneth serves (Quail eggs are tiny. They are meant to be small portions. One is enough and two would be too many, we are told), Service Included is a book of samples. It is vicarious satisfaction and the meringue of dreams. It serves bite-sized rather than whole-meal portions. If the reader is searching for four star secrets of a four star restaurant (how do they manage cooking those quail eggs?) he is more likely to find mentions of the people who dined at Per Se, sans names. And while some of the plain-spoken advice to diners could be of service in a less than mannered world, many of Damrosch’s points should have been drilled into the diners as children. Coughing over another’s food or protracted visits to the restrooms seem to come under the heading of basic good manners rather than restaurant etiquette. The reader is more likely to access gastronomic secrets via Ruth Reichel or Julia Child; however if he is hungry for the back and front stage secrets of a table captain working in a four star restaurant, he will find them in Damrosch’s story. Like many other writers, Damrosch demonstrates that is it the people who matter. It is when Damrosch writes of the human-comestible interaction like the diner who enjoyed taking the heat-retaining cloches off his own plates and was allowed to do so, the co-workers who cheer over the largest tin of caviar she has ever seen when Per Se earns four stars on its first Times review, that she creates a narrative worth reading. --Holly Schoenecker |