Look Who's Dishing!

WAITER RANT

Thanks for the Tip -- Confessions of a Cynical Waiter

By The Waiter

Ecco. 302 pp. $24.95

This amusing and informative book is the work of a man who worked for a half-dozen years as a waiter in a place that he calls The Bistro, "a small fifty-seat restaurant nestled in an artsy neighborhood somewhere in the New York area." Four and a half years ago he started writing a blog called "Waiter Rant," identifying himself as "The Waiter" and going to considerable lengths to preserve his anonymity and that of the restaurant, all the while dishing out juicy tidbits of restaurant life as seen and experienced by a tart-tongued waiter. Now, however, substantial chunks of his blog have found their way between hard covers, and the Manhattan gossip machine, all cylinders fully powered, has outed him.

"The Waiter," it turns out, is Steve Dublanica, 40 years old, and the restaurant, where he no longer works, is the Lanterna Tuscan Bistro in Nyack, a New York suburb on the Hudson River. So the New York Post reported on July 29, though in a subsequent interview with New York magazine Dublanica could "neither confirm or deny this" for "legal reasons." Be that as it may, Dublanica's reaction, as he wrote on the blog, was simple: "What a relief!" Not merely can he now write his blog without hiding behind his "mask," but he can revel publicly in the considerable success the book is enjoying.

By and large this success is deserved. Dublanica is fascinated by other people's stories, of which any restaurant has plenty, and he tells them well, from a young woman tearfully informing her husband she's afraid to have a baby to a happily inebriated couple sneaking off to the ladies' room to get it on. "Many of my patrons are a few pills shy of psychiatric commitment," Dublanica writes, and: "It's a miracle more waiters don't go postal. They're surrounded every day by whiny, spoiled customers and supervised by power-mad control freaks." Small wonder waiters devise ingenious ways to exact revenge. Dublanica says he's never spat in a customer's food en route from the kitchen to the table, "but sometimes I'll employ a nifty chemical weapon that's at every waiter's disposal -- flatulence." His term for "this little maneuver" is "crop-dusting," and no doubt it's the perfect condiment for rude, demanding customers.

Along with the stories, some of which are hilarious, Dublanica provides useful advice for the customer, including the worst times to eat out -- Saturday nights, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, "the center of hell" -- and a number of sensible tips on how to be a good customer, conveniently set forth in an appendix. He rants amusingly about "your typical yuppie food Nazi living inside a cocoon of self-entitlement" and the Food Network, "the Death Star of American cooking" because it turns people into "foodies," with all the half-baked knowledge that suggests.

On the matter of tipping, with which he's unsurprisingly obsessed, one complaint: He doesn't seem to understand that the customer has the right to adjust the tip to the quality of service rather than automatically shell out 18-20 percent. He also doesn't seem to understand that customers are more interested in waiters as servers than as friends, and that the Hi-I'm-Steve-and-I'll-be-your-server-tonight routine is not universally beloved. Otherwise, though, Waiter Rant is as delightful as it is irreverent.

-- Jonathan Yardley