Employee X

Gluttony at Table #1: the Restaurant That Wouldn't Die Employee X

Publisher Marketing: The grim, outrageous, clinical details of a well-known Manhattan restaurant's rise, fall, and protracted and ludicrous death throes. From Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential: "For some time, I've been on the receiving end of a series of long, tortured e-mails, first person dispatches from the front lines of restaurant hell. For almost a year, "Employee X," a NYC restaurant version of Deep Throat regaled me regularly with the grim, outrageous, clinical details of a well-known Manhattan restaurant's rise, fall and protracted and ludicrous death throes. Employee X, clinging to his job at the nerve center of a wildly dysfunctional beast of a restaurant kept me - and a discrete group of appreciative aficionados - constantly informed of every cough and gurgle - every terrifying injustice, humiliation, dashed hope, and bizzarro initiative. It is a story painfully familiar to too many of us who have toiled in the vineyards of restaurateurs from Hell. Employee X had to live it. We readers are now the beneficiaries. Gluttony at Table #1 is a samizdat Kitchen Confidential written in real time, from a narrator with a more omniscient view. Part journal, part personal journey, part freak show, it's a lurid, sensational look into the very deepest, darkest corner of restaurant rectum for which we should all be grateful. This is a story which makes Rocco and Chowderhead's battle of the publicists look like a schoolyard catfight. Welcome to the all-too-real world of Gluttony at Table #1: The Restaurant That Wouldn't Die." Contributor Bio:  X, Employee Employee X has been a writer and editor in corporate America for most of his professional life. He worked for a Fortune 500 company where the long-whispered rumor in the corridors was that the company had once hired an arsonist to torch the hotel where their chief competitors were holding a conference, sending all its upper management up in smoke. He worked for another company where the founder and president was shot and paralyzed outside the courthouse where he was on trial for pornography. And then there was the company where one of the in-house mad scientists took an experimental laser ray up to a hillside overlooking a major metropolitan area to conduct an unauthorized, unsupervised, unbelievable field test. Yet for all that, Employee X doesn't think he's ever quite seen anything like a company at the top of its industry with a 22 kt. gold reputation turning the keys of its kingdom over to a cadre of consultants from an outside consultancy firm to conduct a "lean transformation." You had to see it to believe it. Employee X saw it, and here he chronicles much of what happened before his disbelieving eyes.