The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food

What does it take to get a gourmet meal onto a diner’s plate? Food writer Friedman (Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll) takes readers onto the kill floors of livestock farms and into pressure-cooker kitchens to answer that question in this masterful account. Zooming in on “one dish, in one restaurant”—Chicago eatery Wherewithall’s dry-aged strip loin, tomato, sorrel—Friedman documents “the farmers, rancher, and vintner whose wares comprise the dish” at work; traces the origins of each of the dish’s components; and interviews the restaurant’s staff, including dishwasher Blanca Vasquez, “one of the unseen heroes of Wherewithall’s operation”; chef de cuisine Tayler Ploshehanski, who spends most of her time as a “human conduit between kitchen and dining room teams”; and server Nooshâ Elami, who has learned to intuit “what a table needs.... It’s their body language, how they’re looking at me, how interested they seem.” Friedman excels at bringing the dining room to boisterous life, and sprinkles his profiles of Wherewithall’s staff with vivid, telling details—when dishwasher Blanca, a chef in Ecuador whose immigration to the U.S. “brought a demotion,” describes meals she likes to make, her hands “dance over and around each other... a telltale habit of professional cooks, mimicking the repetitive movement grooved into muscle memory.” This will sate gastronomes and casual foodies alike. (Oct.)