Call Me Waiter

by Joseph Torra

Fiction. CALL ME WAITER is a memoir, with a few liberties taken, of poet and novelist Joseph Torra's twenty years as a waiter and "working the stick" (bartending) in and around Boston. Restaurant work was Torra's night job affording him the time to write his poems (Keeping Watching the Sky, After the Chinese) and his My Ground trilogy of novels. There are no celebrity chefs in Torra's book but plenty of adventures inside the kitchen, out on the restaurant floor and behind the bar. It is a book about one man's world of work. Now Torra can write Call Me Writer.

Genres: Memoir

134 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2008

About the author

Torra was raised in a working class, Italian-American home in Somerville, Massachusetts. He was editor of the literary journal "lift". He has been a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Reviews

[Brett Peruzzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joe Torra's Call Me Waiter takes you behind the scenes of the unsung heroes of the hospitality business - waiters and bartenders. From the exhausting hours and frantic pace to insufferable customers and crazy bosses, Torra shows with a mixture of humor and pathos what it's like every day for those who tie on an apron in the countless eating and drinking establishments of America. Written in a straightforward style with some literary flourishes evocative of his other novels, Call Me Waiter brings to mind Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and other similar tales of the grind of hard work. But he does it without self-pity, accepting the difficulties of the job as a fair trade-off for the freedom it provides to pursue life as a writer. With its many memorable characters and sobering insights into what drives them, Call Me Waiter is a sumptuous meal.

[Vincent DiGirolamo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rivals George Orwell's classic Down and Out in Paris and London.

[David Macpherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dug this. I wish had extra copies to give to friends who wait tables or tend bar. This is a very straight forward look at working the food trade. It is called a novel, but it is a memoir. It gave a sense of life for someone other than me, and to that, I am really happy. It was truthful and bitchy, such as the story that Scott Baio was a terrible person to wait on, very full of himself. Love that catty nonsense. But it also was good at the toll waiting tables has on a body. It was also a nice book about writing, because he waited tables because it allowed him to write. I bought this book on a whim, and I'm glad I did.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A simply written memoir of working in the restaurant business. A slice of life, but not a particularly meaty one.