It's spicy and bitter but never quite filling

Yet where Bourdain's prose is a spicy gumbo, Dublanica's is as cool and clear as aspic. A tasty medium but ultimately not very filling. The difference is passion -- Bourdain loves his work, Dublanica most decidedly does not. Bourdain writes because he's a writer, Dublanica writes to escape the boredom of waiting tables. Where Bourdain sizzles, Dublanica, literally and figuratively, chafes. All would be forgiven if he were laugh-out-loud funny, but, though it is very chuckle-worthy, the book never crosses into belly laughs. Full disclosure: This reviewer has spent a significant portion of her own life waiting tables, so the stories might feel more fresh than familiar to another reader.

Fans of his online rant will recognize much here from the blog. The challenge in turning a popular blog into a book is keeping the flavor that won over online readers while at the same time sustaining a story. The Waiter frames his book with the story of his work life, first being called to the priesthood and then, with the Catholic Church scandals of the late '90s, losing his faith and dropping out of seminary. From there he worked in a psychiatric and drug rehabilitation facility later shut down for fraud and patient abuse.

Disillusioned and broke, Dublanica took a job waiting tables and stumbled into his unlooked-for career. Meticulous, thin-skinned and pushing 40, he reflects on his sense of life passing him by: "It's during moments like these that I hate being a waiter. I get paranoid, thinking that the restaurant business is a trap designed to bleed away the most productive years of my life." The Waiter's inward despair lends emotional ballast to what otherwise might float off into the thin air of the purely anecdotal. But at the same time, it's a little creepy. Here's this lonely, quiet, polite, frustrated guy building up grudges all day and then going home to powder his chafing nethers in Gold Bond and spew his rant onto the Internet. "It's a miracle more waiters don't go postal," he muses in the chapter "Vengeance Is Mine." "They're surrounded every day by whiny, spoiled customers and supervised by power-mad control freaks."

Of course, the one thing that can save him is this book's success. "This writing thing is a crapshoot," he warns us. "If this doesn't work out, I'll have nothing going on, nothing to look forward to."

It makes one desperate to like the book more. Dublanica is indubitably an adept writer, but if I had a tip for him it would be: Don't quit your day job just yet.