A professional, highly trained staff offers a competitive advantage for all foodservice operations, from practical service skills (i.e., setting the table, serving the food, and presenting the check) to less tangible service skills (i.e., creating a welcoming space, exhibiting a helpful attitude, and anticipating customer needs). This revised edition has been thoroughly re-organized and updated with all-new photographs and includes new "Scripts for Service Scenarios" throughout to help servers practice real-world scenarios.

Remarkable Service has been a leading guide to restaurant service techniques and principles for the past decade. In its all-new edition , a complete reorganized and updated look at table service and foodservice management is provided, including everything from setting up a dining room and taking orders to executing wine service and handling customer complaints. Remarkable Service, Third Edition features all-new photography throughout, as well as a foreword by restaurateur Danny Meyer, whose restaurants are legendary for their world-class service. New “Scripts for Service Scenarios” throughout the book provide real-world examples to help readers practice tasks like taking a reservation, recommending a dish, and communicating with kitchen staff. This text is a vital resource for culinary professional, meant to be used as both a development tool for lifelong learning and an essential text for those taking table service and dining room management courses.

Teaching a true commitment to highest-quality service as the most important component of executing successful banquets The catering and events market is expanding rapidly, making superior service an absolute necessity for distinction and successful branding in the event planning industry. Remarkable Banquet Service provides catering and event professionals with straightforward advice on all aspects of exemplary banquet service. This resource covers everything from food and beverage service skills—such as setting up a buffet, butler service, tray service, pouring wine, and clearing tables—to managing staff and coordinating with vendors such as florists, wedding planners, and musicians. Throughout, key service points are illustrated, such as buffet setup, proper plate handling, and synchronized service techniques, as well as guidelines for handling specific events, including business luncheons, fund-raising events, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, and wine-tasting dinners. Step-by-step techniques are accompanied by 100 photos, 40 illustrations, and 10 reproductions of menus, taking all the guesswork out of organizing and managing remarkable—and profitable—banquets and events. Valuable as a modern reference guide and refresher for restaurant chains, hotels, and other foodservice operations that require staff to deliver consistently outstanding service

As competition for customers is constantly increasing, contemporary restaurants must distinguish themselves by offering consistent, high-quality service. Service and hospitality can mean different things to different foodservice operations, and this book addresses the service needs of a wide range of dining establishments, from casual and outdoor dining to upscale restaurants and catering operations. Chapters cover everything from training and hiring staff, preparation for service, front-door hospitality to money handling, styles of modern table service, front-of-the-house safety and sanitation, serving diners with special needs, and service challenges—what to do when things go wrong. Remarkable Service is the most comprehensive guide to service and hospitality on the market, and this new edition includes the most up-to-date information available on serving customers in the contemporary restaurant world.

A collection of whimsical true encounters between famous and infamous individuals describes the unlikely meetings of Marilyn Monroe with Frank Lloyd Wright, Michael Jackson with Nancy Reagan, and Sigmund Freud with Gustav Mahler.

In prose as beautiful as it is powerful, Rita Gabis follows the trail of her grandfather's collaboration with the Nazis; a trail riddled with secrets, slaughter, mystery, and discovery. Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: prior to immigration he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives before Hitler's army swept in. Five years ago, Gabis discovered an unthinkable dimension to her family story: from 1941 to 1943, her grandfather had been Chief of Security Police under the Gestapo in the Lithuanian town of Svencionys, near the killing field of Poligon, where 8,000 Jews were murdered over three days in the fall of 1941. In 1942, the local Polish population was also hunted down. Gabis felt compelled to find out the complicated truth of who her grandfather was and what he had done. Built around dramatic interviews in four countries, filled with original scholarship, and mesmerizing in its lyricism, A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet is a history and family memoir like no other, documenting “the holocaust by bullets” in a remarkable quest as Gabis returns again and again to the country of her grandfather's birth to learn all she can about the man she thought she knew.

Set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, the delectable decadence of Versailles, and the French Revolution, The Last Banquet is an intimate epic that tells the story of one man’s quest to know the world through its many and marvelous flavors. Jean-Marie d’Aumout will try anything once, with consequences that are at times mouthwatering and at others fascinatingly macabre (Three Snake Bouillabaisse anyone? Or perhaps some pickled Wolf's Heart?). When he is not obsessively searching for a new taste d’Aumout is a fast friend, a loving husband, a doting father, and an imaginative lover. He befriends Ben Franklin, corresponds with the Marquis de Sade and Voltaire, becomes a favorite at Versailles, thwarts a peasant uprising, improves upon traditional French methods of contraception, plays an instrumental role in the Corsican War of Independence, and constructs France’s finest menagerie. But d’Aumout’s every adventurous turn is decided by his at times dark obsession to know all the world’s flavors before that world changes irreversibly. As gripping as Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, as gloriously ambitious as Daniel Kehlman’s Measuring the World, and as prize-worthy as Andrew Miller’s Pure, The Last Banquet is a hugely appealing novel about food and flavor, about the Age of Reason and the ages of man, and our obsessions and about how, if we manage to survive them, they can bequeath us wisdom and consolation in old age.