7 Great Novels That Go Behind The Scenes at Restaurants

In this lyrical, insightful ode to making mistakes, our would-be hero Stéphane is up to his elbows in dirty dishes and kitchen drama at a high-end restaurant in Montreal. What’s a kid with a penchant for Iron Maiden, Dungeons & Dragons, and video gambling to do?

Stéphane is a talented graphic designer with fresh ideas and a legit heavy metal band for a client. But before he can stop himself, he’s gambled away his first commission and blown the deadline. He’s also lying to his friends, his parents, and himself. Hiding out from the angry band members and desperate to stop his downward spiral, he takes the first job he can find: washing dishes at La Trattoria.

He quickly makes enemies and allies in the greasy kitchen, and Larue’s prose vividly conveys the unrelenting noise and aromas, as well as the repetitive, grinding physical effort required to churn out — and clean up from — hundreds of meals a day.

Stéphane makes some bad choices, and it’s almost physically painful to read the passages in which he rides the waves and troughs of his gambling addiction. But you also can’t help but root for him to triumph. {more}

… it made me think of everything I was burning, one twenty-dollar bill at a time. It wasn’t my life that was being burnt; it wasn’t just my body that was subjected to the ravages of my own stupidity. I was burning everything I touched: money, friendships, girls, plans. Deep down, I knew I wouldn’t stop until everything was gone. But I kept right on gambling anyway. — Stéphane Larue

For one more shift, Manny DeLeon is the manager of the Red Lobster in a small town in Connecticut, and he’s going to make the best of it. Despite his messed-up love life. Despite the approaching blizzard. Despite the fact that it’s just four days until Christmas.

Hunkered down in the far corner of a mall, the Red Lobster has been abandoned by corporate. All but five of the employees are being let go, and Manny is determined to make their last day together worth remembering.

Every word in Stewart O’Nan’s taut prose seems to have been selected, carefully considered, and then placed with precision into the sentences. The people that populate the Lobster — staff lifers, short-term employees, greedy retirees, the guests of a holiday office party — are as fully-rendered as Manny himself. You almost wonder how they’re doing and where they go to eat, now that the Lobster is closed.

This quiet, evocative story celebrates Manny’s dignity even as it recognizes his powerlessness. And when he closes the restaurant for the last time at 11:00 p.m., we know he’ll carry on — well-intentioned, a little bit tragic, but somehow heroic. {more}

Two months ago, Manny had forty-four people working for him, twenty of them full-time. Tonight when he locks the doors, all but five will lose their jobs, and one of those five — unfairly, he thinks, since he was their leader — will be himself. Monday the survivors will start at the Olive Garden… — Stewart O’Nan

A dinner so delicious it’s to die for? That is literally the case at Sin du Jour, the supernatural catering company.

In this tasty urban fantasy — the first in a series of seven novels — superstar chef Byron ‘Bronko’ Luck is the culinary genius behind a catering company with dangerous clientele: demons. When two chefs are banned from the kitchens of upscale restaurants in Manhattan, Bronko makes them an offer they can’t refuse.

Soon they’re introduced to the diabolical world of paranormal recipes, getting to know co-workers who are not entirely human, and practicing arcane culinary techniques. There are devilish gang wars, zombie clowns, a genie, sublime angels, a secret pantry with unusual ingredients, a mysterious stray dog, an enormous enchanted chicken, and so many other reasons to be very, very afraid.

Our hapless heroes are joined by a piquant cast of supporting characters, including a crew of catering veterans who regularly go hunting for rare ingredients. And all of them, humans and beasts alike, are on a mission to find a particular secret ingredient for the most important catering job in the universe. {more}

They being by sampling mini-oxtail taquitos covered with the absolute hottest mole negro either of them has ever tasted… The second appetizer is a tiny Korean short rib pizza with some type of sriracha-based sauce on top. Its flavor is remarkable but also overwrought with surprising heat. The third dish is a bite-sized stuffed pepper.

‘Who are your clients, Chef? Jamaican pepper farmers?’

‘They like their heat,’ he says simply. — Matt Wallace

The Hills is a grand old-school European-style restaurant in Oslo, Norway. Both the café itself and the waiter of the title are throw-back to a more elegant and refined time — even if they’re also becoming a bit rough around the edges.

Our hero is the Waiter, a man who takes himself — and his role as a server — quite seriously. The ritual of the dining room, his white canvas jacket; these are his shields against the unpredictability and crassness of modern life. Within the walls of The Hills, at least, there can be dignity. Conversations are held to an appropriate murmur, a piano player plinks away on the mezzanine, each lunch and dinner unfolds much like the last. Until the day an unexpected female guest invades the Waiter’s domain and upends everything that’s holding him together.

Like a Wes Anderson film turned into a book, this story partially camouflages its warm heart with smooth style and charm. When the chinks begin to show in the Waiter’s defenses, it’s surprising and delightful — a wry look at the insults and absurdities that life serves to all of us. {more}

The morning, as we all know, belongs to coffee. Regardless of the ripple effects that coffee production and motoring have, it’s hard to imagine a life without the two, ideally in combination, and preferably in the morning. The activities of slurping coffee and driving cars are, in one’s very chromosomes, linked to the idea of getting pumped up and underway… Doing away with one of these is like amputating a limb from the body of society: it’s completely out of the question. — Matias Faldbakken

Nothing has changed at the family-owned Beijing Duck for decades, including the menu (fried rice and Peking duck precisely cut into 28 slices) and the ‘gaudy, overstuffed décor’ of red upholstered chairs, floral carpet, and tasseled lamps.

Owner Jimmy Han is eager to ditch his father’s traditional approach for a more modern, sophisticated restaurant. But his brother Johnny and the customers like things just as they are. The situation is complicated by their domineering mother, the long shadow of their deceased father, and a sketchy, almost-gangster known as Uncle Pang.

Made foolishly bold by his ambition, Jimmy strikes a losing deal with Pang. Soon, tensions and grievances come to a boiling point, and the ensuing act of violence has a profound impact on everyone: the Han brothers, their families, and the staff, who’ve worked at the restaurant for decades.

Word to the wise: Put your favorite Chinese restaurant on speed-dial because you’ll be craving delivery from page one. {more}

The walk-in was the perfect place to propose! They would both cry freezing tears of joy while the frigid temperatures saved their hearts from exploding. Their embrace would keep them warm. He even spotted a bare pallet that made the prospect of getting down on one knee less daunting. — Lillian Li

Our heroine Sirine is an Iraqi-American chef with blonde hair, green eyes, and a heart she’s kept carefully tucked away from harm. When she meets Han, an Iraqi literature professor in exile from his home country, she allows herself to fall joyously, recklessly in love.

As Sirine and Han’s intimacy grows, she begins to explore her Iraqi identity as he grapples with the memories of the places and people he left behind. When the real world of politics intervenes in their new love, they both must face the past and a dangerously uncertain future.

Most of the action in this poignant love story plays out in a family-owned Lebanese restaurant in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles known as Tehrangeles. Students and professors from UCLA, far from their homelands, find comfort and community at Nadia’s Café where Sirine is the cook. They become a family of sorts, bonding over bowls of hummus and the dire news they read in their day-old Iraqi newspapers.

And Sirine’s kebabs and saffron rice become shorthand for feelings that are far too complex and significant to be expressed in words. {more}

Sirine has lived in her uncle’s calm library of a house nearly all her life; she’s never quite understood how people could trade in quiet spaces and solitary gardens and courtyards, thoughtful walks and the delicious rhythms of work, for the fearful tumult of falling into love. — Diana Abu-Jaber

Author Rob Hart knows his way around the darker alleys of the human psyche. He’s best known for his Ash McKenna detective series and the chilling (and wildly entertaining) near-future dystopian thriller The Warehouse.

In this story collection, he further explores the intersection of human foibles, illicit motives, and humor — while also serving up plenty of tempting plates of grub. Each installment is a sharply detailed, bite-sized world, like a novel that’s been simmered and reduced just right. The characters are multifaceted, the settings are vividly rendered, the atmosphere is thick with aromas and smoke and deception.

Our favorite story, ‘Have you eaten?’ is a slightly sinister celebration of street food in Singapore’s Chinatown. In it, our hero waxes poetic about his favorite eats at hole-in-the-wall joints around the world while tucking into char kway teow (‘…rice noodles and Chinese sausage and blood cockles. There were crisp cubes of pork lard, too…) and Hainanese chicken rice (‘…boiled chicken, served with a sauce, then the rice is cooked in ginger and chicken fat’).

In the title story, a gambler makes suspicious deliveries to work off his debt to a Chinatown gambling parlor; just what is in those white take-out boxes, anyway? ‘How to Make the Perfect New York Bagel’ is a snapshot of shakedowns, enduring friendship, and the savory satisfaction of well-timed payback. {more}

New York’s restaurant scene is surmountable only to the smartest, the most talented, the most willing. This is a city where a week’s salary will buy you a meal at Per Se and a handful of crumbled bills will buy you a meal at a filthy stall in Chinatown, and you’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite between the two. — Rob Hart