Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter [Paperback]

Phoebe Damrosch is an impeccably educated English major who fancied herself an artist and loathed the thought of taking a job as a drone in a publishing industry to ensure a steady paycheck. She writes, "eventually I had to accept that I wasn't working in restaurants to support my art like most of my co-workers; I was posing as an artist to justify my work as a waiter." When she failed to find solid work utilizing her degree, Damrosch joined a hellish underground bootcamp to score a job in one of New York's most elite restaurants (a place at which a party could easily drop $20,000 on dinner, and the service captains made six digit salaries).

During her year working at Per Se, Damrosch memorized the life stories of the ingredients in every dish in the restaurant, became well-versed on the architecture visible from the restaurant's windows, and learned to anticipate the needs of her guests before the guests themselves voiced them. She worked eight to ten hour shifts on her feet, juggling the needs of her tables and the whims of her guests while appearing calm and composed. She was one of the only female captains the elite circle of NYC 4-star restaurants.

Service Included is a secret window into the world of ultra-high-end hospitality, and a foodie's delight. It is not, however, an "eavesdropping" tale. Damrosch would have done well to title her memoir more accurately, because it stands on its own as a glimpse inside an unusual and elite profession. Her memoir is also unique among restaurant confessionals, because she's reporting from the front of the house, not the kitchen. The allows her to provide the reader reservations at the best seat in the house for their vicarious experience at Per Se.

Service Included suffers from a lack of clear direction. For the most part, it is a "year inside a restaurant," with a twist of romance, but in one strange passage, the author launches into a diatribe against "gun-toting, pro-life, pro-death, gas-guzzling, warmongering, monolingual, homophobic, wiretapped, Bible-thumping, genetic-engineering, stem-cell-harboring, abstinent creationist" fans of President Bush. This occurs out of context in the middle of an otherwise excellent passage about the family connections among a restaurant's wait staff, and never again does Damrosch discuss politics at length.

The cynical reader might even suspect that Damrosh selected "a year in high-end hospitality" as her first professional writing exercise. She certainly joined and left the industry as if it were an experiment, a chapter in her life accomplished. With fodder for her first book deal, Damrosch submitted her resignation and walked away from her restaurant reputation.

I'm not usually inclined to go write a review about something I bought, but since Service Included requires a decent amount of time to read, I figured I could save some people some time by writing this brief blurb.

That is to say, you should pass on this book. Perhaps the first half will hold your interest as thats where the bulk of the info on Per Se is - and that's what anyone who buys this book is looking for. But gradually the book becomes about the life of this random author with a NYC life as anonymous and ordinary as those lived by the "suits" walking into office buildings on Madison Avenue - the very people she loves to jab presumably for being so boring. The story devolves into a journey of personal discovery in her love life with some guy, who seems, by my measure, to be an arrogant tool. I kept on thinking, "who cares?" Love of this variety happens every night in bars all over this town.

In the end, you close the book and feel like the author just sat you down to talk about herself; the story about the restaurant, Keller, food, hospitality, is a mere detail in her self-absorbed mellow drama. Fine for a diary, painful for a book marketed to the public.

Recommendation is 1) not to get this 2) if youve already purchased it, read the first quarter, maybe the first half, and move on to another book.

The author is apparently a trustfunder dabbling in various "careers." While the descriptions of the intracacies of working at Per Se were interesting, I kept waiting for more interesting tidbits, such as outlandish celebrity behaviors. The author teases us a little, with comments about how many people throw up in the restaurant, but she refuses to really "dish." She does, however, come up with a truly disgusting story one of her regulars told her. It seemed weird and out of place, like she realized the book was getting dull and decided to shake things up. It was very bizarre.

The food descriptions were good, but the relationship with the sommalier was truly tedious to read about.

I love books about the restaurant industry, but I would advise skipping this one. The one question she never answered was how she managed to pay the student loans her pricey education must have incurred, while meandering from job to job. Yes, I know Per Se probably pays well, but Brooklyn barista jobs do not.

I also would have liked a little more information on how Keller's new policy of paying the servers a straight hourly wage rather than tips worked out. Was she the only one who left? This is a huge issue for servers (and the people who tip them),yet she barely addressed it other than to say it was instituted. The author may have thought we were more interested in her personal relationships. I, for one, was not.