The Last Supper Club: A Waiter's Requiem

(Hardback)

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A servers rare and radiant love letter to the world of fine dining

During a year on sabbatical from his university position, Matthew Batt realized he needed moneyfastand it just so happened that one of the biggest breweries in the Midwest was launching a restaurant and looking to hire. So it was that the forty-something tenured professor found himself waiting tables at a high-end restaurant situated in a Minneapolis brewery. And loving it.

Telling the story of Batts early work in restaurants, from a red sauce joint possibly run by the mob to an ill-conceived fusion concept eatery, The Last Supper Club then details his experiences at the fine dining restaurant, a job that continued well past his sabbaticalthat lasted, in fact, right up to the restaurants sudden and unceremonious closing three years later, shortly after it was named one of the best restaurants in the country by Food & Wine.

Batts memoir conveys the challengeand the satisfactionof meeting the demands of a frenzied kitchen and an equally expectant crowd. Through training mishaps, disastrous encounters with confused diners, struggles to keep pace with far more experienced coworkers, mandatory memorizations of laundry lists of obscure ingredients, and the stress of balancing responsibilities at home and at work, The Last Supper Club reveals the ups and downs of a waiters workday and offers an insightful perspective on what makes a job good, bad, or great. For Batt, this job turns out to be considerably more fun, and possibly more rewarding, than his academic career, and his insiders view of waiting tables extols the significance of our food and the places where we gather to enjoy itor serve it.

Told with sharp humor, humility, and a keen sense of what matters, The Last Supper Club is an ode to life in a high-pressure restaurant, the relationships that get you to the nights close, and finding yourself throughor perhaps because ofthe chaos of it all.

Author Bio

Matthew Batt is author of the memoir Sugarhouse. His fiction and nonfiction have been featured in the New York Times, Outside Magazine, the Huffington Post, Tin House, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, and the Aspen Writers Institute, he teaches creative writing and English at the University of St. Thomas and lives in Saint Paul with his family.