'Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip -- Confessions of a Cynical Waiter' by The Waiter

"The Waiter" is the formerly anonymous author of the popular blog Waiter Rant who has been dishing up true stories from the front lines of competitive dining since 2004, drawing loyal fans and winning a Bloggie for best writing. The Waiter has kept his identity secret these last four years, but it seems the temptation of fame was too much. Last month he outed himself to the New York Post as Steve Dublanica, a 38-year-old waiter at a small Italian bistro in Nyack, N.Y.

"Waiter Rant" has all the fixings for fun. "When you work in a restaurant there's never a shortage of interesting stories. I think I'm especially attenuated to what's going on around me," Dublanica tells us. "And at The Bistro these stories can go from the sublime to the ridiculous in ten seconds flat." He delivers a smorgasbord of objectionable personalities and high-stress situations, always serving from the left, rendering his stories impeccably but perhaps a little stiffly.

Everybody gets their due: his temperamental, paranoid bosses; the noble, illegal busboys; the slacker co-waiters. But Dublanica's true bile is reserved for customers: the rude, the ridiculous, the entitled, the drunk, the horny, the stoned and, worst of all, the Foodies. "The Food Network," he writes, "is, quite simply, the Death Star of American cooking." Apparently, overexposure to Emeril and Kobe beef has created a know-it-all public:

"Foodie-porn TV programming has generated a new class of entitled customers with already overblown culinary expectations and a rapidly diminishing set of social graces. Economists say that the restaurant business is a bellwether of the nation's economic health -- but I think it's a bellwether of America's mental health as well. And let me tell you, 20 percent of the American dining public are socially maladjusted psychopaths."

Of course, the people in the aprons are none too stable either. Anger them and you could have your hamburger used as a hockey puck in the kitchen before it's put on your plate.

Because Dublanica whips off the starched linen tablecloth revealing the rotten underbelly of American food service, this book is being heralded as "the front-of-the-house version of 'Kitchen Confidential.' " What Anthony Bourdain's tell-all about life in the kitchen did for Hollandaise sauce, "Waiter Rant" will do for side salads. On top of monster cockroaches, inflated checks and fetid employee bathrooms, Dublanica confirms our worst fear of all: "Waiters can and do spit in people's food."