Gluttony at Table #1

The grim, outrageous, clinical details of a well-known Manhattan restaurant's rise, fall, and protracted and ludicrous death throes. From Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential "For some time, I've been on the receiving end of a series of long, tortured e-mails, first person dispatches from the front lines of restaurant hell. For almost a year, "Employee X," a NYC restaurant version of Deep Throat regaled me regularly with the grim, outrageous, clinical details of a well-known Manhattan restaurant's rise, fall and protracted and ludicrous death throes. Employee X, clinging to his job at the nerve center of a wildly dysfunctional beast of a restaurant kept me - and a discrete group of appreciative aficionados - constantly informed of every cough and gurgle - every terrifying injustice, humiliation, dashed hope, and bizzarro initiative. It is a story painfully familiar to too many of us who have toiled in the vineyards of restaurateurs from Hell. Employee X had to live it. We readers are now the beneficiaries. Gluttony at Table #1 is a samizdat Kitchen Confidential written in real time, from a narrator with a more omniscient view. Part journal, part personal journey, part freak show, it's a lurid, sensational look into the very deepest, darkest corner of restaurant rectum for which we should all be grateful. This is a story which makes Rocco and Chowderhead's battle of the publicists look like a schoolyard catfight. Welcome to the all-too-real world of Gluttony at Table #1: The Restaurant That Wouldn't Die."