BEST BOOKS ON...

RESTAURANTS

GOODNESS, I have missed restaurants. Not to the extent that I am in a rush to eat out somewhere with Perspex partitions, masked maître d’s and socially distanced settings. But a cafe terrace perhaps? An ice-cream with the kids in this high-summer weather?

After months of housekeeping in a way most of my generation have never had to — of meal planning, eking out a weekly shop, scratch cooking and storing — the luxury of a meal prepared by someone else feels like a promise of normality.

For my mother, an accomplished cook, the highlight of our 1980s family holidays to southern Spain was eating out most evenings. My first taste of many cuisines came via the restaurants of that resort: melting aubergine and mozzarella, the delicious schnitzel of a German bistro, calamari and prawns a la plancha.

Later, I worked in restaurants. My first job, at 16, was as a ‘Sweets girl’ at an old-fashioned restaurant, making up sundaes, buttering bread and doling out the sauce pots.

Each restaurant has its own hierarchy: a proprietor or manager, the chefs, waiters ranked by experience, then the lowlier kitchen staff. No one who has ever seen a truly gifted waiter at work would ever dismiss service as unskilled labour. Casey, the struggling heroine of Lily King’s Writers & Lovers knows this.

Her vocation is the novel she is writing, but her job is working double-shifts at Harvard’s Iris restaurant alongside the formidably unflappable Mary Hand.

Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter captures what a crazed, high-octane world a top-flight restaurant can be. Its heroine, Tess, comes of age as a New Yorker, waitressing to the city’s entitled, then partying too hard with her colleagues.

Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant is a family affair. But will it remain so, if ‘Little Boss’ Jimmy Han sells out his late father’s pride and joy to the rapacious Uncle Pang? And where will that leave the restaurant’s long-standing staff?

The hospitality sector has been badly hit by lockdown. As and when you do decide to take the plunge to eat out, make sure to tip.