Fried

<b>From the finest restaurants of Paris to the Kashmiri Dining Room at the Ambassador Motor Hotel in St. Louis Park Minnesota Steve Lerach offers an entertaining outrageous and compassionate look at the people who put the food on your plate.</b>

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For two hundred years a rogues' gallery of chefs line cooks and dishwashers have slaved away largely unseen to serve the dining public. Their pedigrees reach back to the first restaurants during the reign of France's Louis XVI and extend to the Delmonico brothers in New York Escoffier in Paris and in <i>Fried: Surviving Two Centuries in Restaurants</i> a renegade cook in Minneapolis walking like a duck with a whole raw salmon on his head.

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Author and professional chef Steve Lerach first stepped through the swinging kitchen doors when he was in high school starting as a dishwasher and he never left. He introduces us to an old potwasher who did time for bootlegging a stuttering Irish chef who collected funds for the bomb throwers of the IRA and a gay Vietnam vet who found a measure of acceptance only in restaurants.

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Lerach humorously and poignantly interweaves restaurant legend and lore with his own experiences exposing similarities not only of profession but of the diverse characters who work the back of the house. Though funny and simply fun to read these tales often end in tragedy as various actors succumb to their excesses. Lerach serves up glimpses of the hard work camaraderie and satisfaction that distinguish careers in what may arguably be called the world's second-oldest profession.