If you’re still on the search for great holiday gifts, here’s an idea, especially for foodies, restaurant folks and anyone interested in what it takes to make money when you’ve chosen a creative profession. In “The Last Supper Club: A Waiter’s Requiem,” author Matthew Batt gives readers an inside look at what it’s like to be in the service industry.
In 2015, Batt was watching the bills pile up from his student loans and his child’s day care expenses. He was on sabbatical from his job as an associate professor of English, and had planned to use the time off to work on his next book, about work in America. He kept on getting distracted, though, by fiction writing he was working on, and quickly realized what he really needed to do was to make some money. He ended up getting a job as a waiter for the Brewer’s Table, a high-end restaurant operated on the upstairs of Surly Brewing Co., and as a bartender at an unnamed “lake place” in his neighborhood.
The book follows Batt as he reimmerses himself into the world of serving, after 15 years of working in academia. It’s stressful and maddening at times, but it turns out he loves it, and ended up working at the Brewer’s Table for the whole of its existence, until it closed in 2017.
I chatted with Matt about the book, and why he loves working in the restaurant industry so much, as well as how, as a writer, he’s found ways to keep afloat financially in a world that doesn’t make it easy for creative people. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sheila Regan: Are you working at a restaurant right now?
Matthew Batt: No, I’m back to teaching actually.
SR: Gotcha. At the end of the book, you wrote about being back to teaching, but also still had some restaurant work on the side.
MB: Yeah, I did for a while. It was kind of like trying to keep the band together. A bunch of us bounced to another place — it’s where La Belle Vie was. It was a beautiful building, right by the sculpture garden and all that. I stayed there until we got a call literally on New Year’s Day saying yesterday was our last day. About that time, my mom got sick, and I needed to be with her, and it just became untenable. In a lot of ways, that’s part of what made those years working at the Brewer’s Table special. I was really lucky to be able to do it. The timing was perfect in so many ways. I couldn’t have started that job while I was teaching full time, and I couldn’t have started that job when my mom got sick, and I couldn’t have taken the job when my son was younger. I’m 50 years old now, I don’t think I could handle just the physical strain of being on my feet that long. I think I clocked it one time with my phone — I put in seven or eight miles in any given shift. I just don’t think I could physically hack it anymore.
SR: When I started this book, I thought it was going to be more gossipy about your work as a waiter, but you kind of had more negative things to say about academia than the restaurant industry. Would you say that’s true?
MB: 100%, yeah. I have no complaints about working in the restaurant business other than, like, it’s hard. It’s kind of truth in advertising right there. And nobody pretends it’s going to be anything it isn’t.
I wrote in the book that I have incurred tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. I have the job I always wanted, but it doesn’t pay at all what I thought it was going to. I’m just literally stuck with over $1,000 in student loan payments every month. I’m still paycheck to paycheck, and working at the restaurant was the only time where I felt like, holy cow, I’m making good money, I’m having fun, I’m basically getting paid to work out and carry heavy things and get lots of steps in and all that.
SR: OK, so talk to me about Anthony Bourdain.
MB: Yeah, that’s a complicated one that feels a lot different if he were still alive. But at any rate, I feel like he was one of the people who I needed to read at exactly the right time in my life. I think it was like 1999, 2000, 2001, somewhere around there. There was this boom of writers who were kind of unpredictably important to me. I’d worked in a lot of restaurants by the time I read “Kitchen Confidential,” but I didn’t really understand why I loved it so much until I read those essays, and I think got to know the the sort of beautiful recklessness of his whole point of view on food and people and restaurants, especially between him and Mary Carr’s “Liar’s Club” and Dave Eggers “Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” I just found the right three people who weren’t captains of industry, or famous people in any way. They were just ordinary people telling stories and writing books about underrepresented stories of life in America, and they all just really hit a chord with me, but probably no one more so than Anthony Bourdain.
SR: You’re a very different writer than Anthony Bourdain was, and you strike me as a different person. Bourdain’s writing is so critical of the industry, and I don’t really see his kind of satirical bite at the industry.
MB: I think at some point, I realized food writing in general is about 90% chef memoirs, and the other 10% are bitchy waiter memoirs or something like that. I knew I didn’t really want to be a part of that 10%, and I knew I couldn’t be a part of the 90%. I realized near the end of the Brewer’s Table, like, wow, I’ve just experienced the entire lifespan of this restaurant, and it was the best job I’ve ever had. I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to tell its story through the veil of a love letter to a restaurant.
I know what you’re getting at about Bourdain. His bluster is like a pirate, whereas I assume the position of a deckhand or something. I’m just trying to stay out of the way, whereas he’s trying to cut people’s heads off. But I think in a lot of ways, we’re both trying to drive at the same destination. I think he definitely is eager and all too happy to take down people who have an overinflated sense of themselves, or the importance of their restaurant. But at the same time, he was always just as happy to sit on an overturned milk crate and eat something that was fried up in Cambodia on the back of a hubcap or something.
SR: There’s a vulnerability in your writing. There’s a lightness to the way that you write about that experience that almost seemed like you’re a kid.
MB: Yeah, I definitely respond to that. I mean, there’s something about stepping back into the world of the restaurant world well into my 40s. I had never worked in a real fancy restaurant before the Brewer’s Table. Even though I had maybe another degree in academia, it certainly didn’t mean anything in that universe. So I was absolutely the new kid. Even though I was twice as old as many of them.
SR: It seems often to be the case that a lot of writers end up teaching as a way to continue writing. Was writing this book a way to explore another way?
MB: For creative writers, we get sort of processed through the churn of higher education and more higher education and secondary degrees and more secondary degrees, such that you wind up with massive student loan debts unless you were lucky enough to be one of the gilded guys that got through fellowships and scholarships and grants and all that. You wind up on the other side of it and say, wait a second, there are probably four or five jobs in any given state, that are the ones that you want. We just think, well, I’ll just stick it out until one of those five jobs open up, and then of course, they almost never do, because people keep them for life. At some point, you realize how this isn’t really what I planned, but it’s all I’m qualified to do.
I was lucky enough to randomly apply for a restaurant job, which felt like going back to what I was doing in high school. That was really the eye opener for me — not only did I love that job, but I found out by the second or third paycheck, that I was making as much money waiting tables at a nice restaurant, as I was as an associate professor of English.
SR: How do you handle conversations with students that want to be writers? Do you tell them to run?
MB: You know, I feel like I was told all the right things, but not with enough emphasis. I know more than one professor when I was an undergrad said, don’t take out student loans to go to grad school for writing. But they never buttonholed me and said, you’ll never in your life, pay them back. I kind of wish they would have given me a more clear sort of metaphor, like, I know you have your imaginary job that you think is going to pay all the bills, and you’re going to have a lake house and whatever. Take a zero off of that paycheck, and your student loan debt is going to be in the 1000s, not hundreds of dollars — do you still want to take out $35,000 for a master’s degree in English, that will get you precisely nothing, except for maybe the opportunity to take out yet more money to get another master’s degree. Or maybe even a PhD.? The irony is, I loved my time in grad school. I don’t regret that at all, I met my wife. It was wonderful. But it was just kind of like my time at the Brewer’s Table. It was ultimately unsustainable. You gotta, you gotta leave and go back to the real world.
My whole thing with my students is not to scare them away from the arts, but just to not think that the only pass-through is a college degree or graduate school, or you know, incurring more and more student loan debt.
SR: Do you think you’ll go back to serving at some point?
MB: I don’t know. It’s funny because I have a few friends who work at some super high-end places, and I don’t think I could just step into it right now. But we’ll see about next summer.
Pick up your copy of “The Last Supper Club: A Waiter’s Requiem” at your local bookstore, or online.
