You have to be brave to be a restaurant critic. So it should be no surprise that when she wrote about her ten years as a waitress before she did “the career equivalent of a reverse four-and-a-half somersault pike from the 3-metre board and became a restaurant critic”, Larissa Dubecki went to town. There are confessions (drugs? Yes, she did. Sex with the boss? Yes, again – although they were already a couple before he became her boss), rants (“food allergies are little more than a hobby of the bored elite”) and lots of deeply, sometimes savagely, unflattering descriptions of former employers and colleagues.
So in the two weeks since was released, has Dubecki been sued? Threatened with bodily harm? Wished she’d phrased anything a little more, well, tactfully? Here are a few of those brave lines, the questions they prompted us to ask and Dubecki’s answers.
Source: Sharyn Cairns
On why almost no-one wants to be a waiter:
“I don’t think anyone sets out to become a career waiter… I’m sure being a waiter was once a noble calling with its own arcane procedures and rituals. Now, however, it’s the default position. Even the lowliest chef can claim to feel a vocational pull, but the people running the food from kitchen to table are, nine times out of ten, simple economic tourists, doing the job as a means to an end. All biding their time until real life begins.”
Q. How’s that gone down with the restaurant industry?
Well, I guess the flipside is that I’m saying one out of every ten waiters is doing a good job, right? The great waiters have my utmost respect – especially these days when they’re expected to be something like a mixture of Marcel Marceau, the Dalai Lama and Batman’s valet Alfred. But it’s undeniably true that most waiters are there for a short time rather than for a career. They’re doing the job as a means to an end to put themselves through uni or until they figure out what they really want to do with their life or whatever. Some waiters have certainly taken umbrage, saying PWAF brings the industry into disrepute, but you just have to look around your average restaurant to see some pretty inept stuff going on. Anyway, who wants to read a book about good waiters? That’d be boring.
On strippers, short skirts and good lines:
“I nearly killed a half-naked stripper with a sharp knife. True story.”
Q. The second chapter of the book includes the story of your second – very-short-lived – waiter’s job, an entertaining tale involving a skirt that wasn’t short enough, near-naked dancers and an accident with a stray steak knife. People who write fiction have to make these sorts of things up, but you seem to have had an endless parade of ridiculous, painful, funny or just downright awful experiences. Did everything in the book really happen? Or did you have to tweak a few details here and there to avoid causing people real pain or professional harm?
I never realised it at the time but working in the hospitality industry is the perfect field if you want to collect a motley collection of weird tales for future use in a gonzo memoir. It’s positively picaresque. That said, it’s interesting to note that it’s only the people who’ve never worked in hospo who ask if all the stories are true. Not a single waiter or former waiter has questioned it. They know it’s true. Every bit.
On hipsters:
“Hipsterism’s over. It’s OVER. It was tagged and bagged when the Sunday papers started to include them in their ‘know your tribe’ features. It’s an era now safely locked away inside the parameters of time; a bygone historical moment to squirm over.”
Q. It seems the bearded, fixie-riding, artisan-brew drinking dudes haven’t heard. Could this be wishful thinking?
A fair argument, although the hipsters won’t be joining your defence because they prefer to deny they exist at all (while they ride their fixies, brew their artisanal coffee, etc…). They’re shadowier even than the Masons. All I’m saying is that the notion of the hipster is now so mainstream as to be meaningless. That said, I’m quite partial to my husband’s beard. And he owns two cafes in Brunswick. Ahem. Enough said.
On drugs:
“Speed, I firmly believe, is the perfect drug for hospitality workers… Speed was king at the Rising Damp. Speed kept the place humming. Speed was in the plasterwork and the floors, speed kept the dishwasher door slamming and the steaks sizzling and the shiny, happy people well-fed and watered. Sometimes it felt like you only need cut a little nick into the timber of the glossy curving bar and a fine white powder would trickle out. But maybe that was because we were doing so much of it.”
Q. You go on to say in the book “I don’t exactly regret the time I spent doing drugs. I’m not exactly proud of it either, but being embarrassed about it would be like being embarrassed about the whole summer I spent watching re-runs of the Sullivans… It’s just something that happened. … And it’s fun. It’s fun to the nth degree.” Did you have to think twice about whether to talk about your drug use in the book?
Sure did. But any true account of my life as a waiter would have a big, gaping hole if it ignored the post-work refreshments. I’m a journalist first and foremost, and I’m heartily sick of all the obfuscation. Besides, times have changed. When even Barack Obama can talk publicly about snorting coke in college and still be POTUS, I think it shows the conversation has changed. My motto: publish and be damned.
On food allergies and special requests:
Food allergies are little more than a hobby of the bored elite, anyway. Allergies and their bastard cousin, the intolerance, cluster in wealthy areas. Poor people can’t afford allergies.
“Staring into a toilet bowl is the modern urban elite’s answer to reading the tealeaves. Maybe they don’t realise that only one in 100 people is truly allergic to gluten… But a staggering one in ten Australians (and one in seven Americans) now claim to be gluten intolerant. That means at least nine out of 100 people are either lying or stupid enough to confuse toast binge discomfort with a legitimate medical condition. … I really wouldn’t care a jot if these people stayed home to eat their miserable cuisine of denial. Really I wouldn’t. But they won’t rest until they get anything less than world domination.”
“I feel revoltingly sorry for any real allergy sufferers. A life without pasta or cheese is a life half-lived… The legitimate sufferers ought to be mounting a class action against the fraudsters who’ve tarnished them with the picky-eater brush.”
Q. Okay, so that’s just a couple of snippets – you kinda went to town on this topic, didn’t you?
Let’s face it, dietaries are really annoying. It’s no longer permissible for any chef to be anything other than cheerfully accommodating of all the weird things people claim to be allergic to these days, but I promise you that behind the scenes they’re swearing a blue streak. It’s totally understandable when it’s a legitimate medical condition – my own mother is so allergic to dairy food she’d probably die if she ate an ice-cream – but I’ve seen people carry on about their lactose intolerance then go and order cheesecake. As for the waiters who have to carry these requests to the chefs, it’s a whole new world of pain.
On bad bosses and strange colleagues:
“…a porcine slob named Bruce with a weak chin, a massive gut barely corralled by his trademark striped polo shirts and a fondness for the genial sexism of the middle-aged man.”
“Trevor was a mouse of a man … the guy who had sand kicked in his face at the beach by the guy who had sand kicked in his face by the other guys.”
Q. A lot of your employees and fellow workers – well, the male ones, mostly – are portrayed as sexist, stupid, angry…. Has anyone got upset because they think they’ve recognised themselves in the book?
Not yet, but it’s early days. I hasten to add that I wasn’t out for revenge, so to speak. The purpose of the book wasn’t to rake through the mud and throw it at former colleagues. I took the equation that tragedy plus time equals comedy. I’ve fallen about laughing for years when I look back on the carnage that was my twenties. Besides, all names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty. If people go looking and recognise themselves, well, I can’t really do anything about it. It’s all true, so maybe we’ve all got to face up to our pasts.
On not loving food much (and how a hot tray of lasagne ended years of life as a vegetarian):
…not only did I not love the hospitality industry, I did not love food. Truth be told, I did not even particularly like food.
"I was brought up in a family where meat was brown, chicken was white and fish and chips meant Sunday night. My older sister and I were true children of 1970s suburbia. We hated each other – there were several attempts on my life in the years 1975-78 – yet in one thing we were united: food was, at most, a necessary evil.”
“…a bubbling tray of lasagne with a rich Bolognese sauce has just been taken from the oven. The smell is intoxicating. The smell says, ‘Eat me and you shall be made whole.’ … Don’t ask me why it was that lasagne and not another that lured me back to the dark side carrying a letter of apology for my canine teeth. I’d encountered other meaty things that smelled good during those wilderness years. I’d been freezing cold plenty of times. None had tempted me to renounce the thing in my life closest to religion.”
Q. You say in the book that it was your relationship with Ben – now your husband – that got you excited about food. What gets you excited about food now, after ten years of eating out professionally?
Everything! I love food, and I particularly love restaurants, partly because they save me from having to do the dishes, but mostly because they’re such brilliant arenas of entertainment. I never get sick of going out to eat, even if it’s for the fifth time that week and there’s some excellent trash TV calling my name. I’m a simple gal at heart – my favourite thing is real, proper rustic Italian food, although Yotam Ottolenghi’s oeuvre really floats my boat, too. My vegetarian past is lingering under the surface, so I usually eat vego when I’m on my own. I make these massive salad extravaganzas – the other day I tried jalapenos and tofu with soy sauce and garlic, which was kind of weird. My last meal would be mud crab with scallions and ginger, because it’s so delicious and also because it takes so long to eat.
On getting better treatment as a restaurant critic:
“It’s true you can’t polish a turd, as the poet says. An ordinary chef can’t suddenly become a better chef. The menu can’t go from bog-awful to WOW in the blink of an eye just because someone armed with a notebook and a quiver full of adjectives walks in the door. It just can’t.
You can, however, roll a turd in glitter. Restaurants give critics bigger servings, the best product, the nicest table and the most attentive service, even though it can be so tortured and stiff it’s like being stuck in an elevator with the cast of Home and Away.”
Q. Did you enjoy having a reason to write “roll a turd in glitter”?
I’ve been looking for an excuse for quite a number of years now. In fact, the entire reason I decided to write Prick With A Fork was so I could finally use it. Mission accomplished.
Extracts from Prick with a Fork: The world's worst waitress spills the beans by Larissa Dubecki (Allen & Unwin, $29.99, pbk)
Table photograph by Sharyn Cairns. Styling by Lee Blaylock. Food preparation by Rachel Lane. Creative concept by Lou Fay.
