But Never Eat Out on a Saturday Night: An Appetizing Glimpse Behind the Scenes in All Kinds of Great American Restaurants

"The last days of _haute cuisine_" is a phrase tossed off in passing by Jim Quinn in this classic book, most of whose chapters are his skillfully rendered accounts of time spent behind the scenes at a diverse array of restaurants, observing the foibles and cultures. Tell Erhardt working furiously in his restaurant kitchen in Chicago and dispensing "general advice about life and vegetables." Teenage girls at a Philly cheese-steak house firing orders for "Cheese with" amid comparing notes on a boy (evidently dippy). Quinn catches the tempo of these milieus beautifully -- he is a storyteller at heart, who is also knowledgeable about food and restaurants, exactly the sort of person who can write well about them. The chapters were published as articles in _Harper's_ and elsewhere before compilation into this book. The penultimate chapter, "Why it tastes so bad," indicts those parts of the "foodservice" industry that are traditionally so prominent in advertisements in _Restaurant Business_ magazine (which Quinn also mentions). They gave us frozen shrimp with the breading pre-dyed in a range of appetizing toasty shades even before it hits the hot Frymax, and those machine-made potato pieces "with just enough of the skin left on" that invaded all the upper-end chain restaurants about the time the book was written, 20 years ago. This chapter is delightful, and horrible.At this moment this book is out of print (as of course are most good books at any given moment) although like many others, it can be found used. A pity because it has lost none of its relevance. I should have gotten more copies for lending and gifts. (Maybe if I order enough of them, it will be reprinted again, as with Wechsberg's _Blue Trout and Black Truffles_ a few years ago.)"The last days of _haute cuisine_" was a casual sentence in Quinn's book. Recently Patric Kuh wrote a worthy new book about restaurants and used the same sentence for his title, but did not even mention Quinn (for reasons Kuh would know better than I). Quinn nevertheless is part of the context of new US writing on restaurants, whether or not its authors bother to know (or acknowledge) this. Here as elsewhere, the best writing on a subject is not necessarily the very latest. Rarely is this truer than about food, as witness Mary Anna DuSablon's remark that the 850 cookbooks in print in the US in 1962 became 6000 by 1984, with two new titles a day published. Does anyone seriously imagine a corresponding growth of new ideas, or imagine (conversely) that this contemporary scrambling to publish reflects anything negative on earlier classics?

Jim Quinn writes about what goes on behind the scenes in a variety of restaurants - top of the line, a diner, a pizza place, a place at the Jersey Shore, a cheese steak shop, a Chinese restaurant, and even McDonalds. The first two pieces, on the diner and top restaurant, are fascinating. As an extra, he gives hints on what to look out for while eating out, and how to review a restaurant. An absolutely fascinating book, recommended for anyone who eats out.