The Last Supper Club

A Waiter’s Requiem

MATTHEW BATT

A witty and humble tribute to the sometimes profane, sometimes profound world of waiting tables

“Deliciously funny, vividly peopled, wise, and big-hearted, The Last Supper Club is a book you will devour in one sitting and wish you could go back for seconds. If Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter had a love child, it would be this superb book!”

—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me

“This book should come with a trigger warning for those of us who’ve ever waited tables. Like any great dish, The Last Supper Club has so many layers and flavors: it’s a waiter’s memoir, it’s a vital history of a remarkable restaurant, it’s an incisive meditation on the nature of work, and it’s a heartfelt story of someone who went searching for a paycheck but found something else entirely—family, and purpose, and joy.”

—Nathan Hill, author of The Nix and Wellness

“In his gloriously food-obsessed and mournful memoir The Last Supper Club, Matthew Batt channels the thrill of a seamless service, the tension of having no place to hide failure, and the implicit critique of academic jobs that require a second income. His ode to the chaos and thrill of the restaurant business is a hilarious, elegiac look at the all-too-brief gratification of being exactly where you want to be.”

—Michelle Wildgen, author of Wine People

During a year on sabbatical from his university position, Matthew Batt realized he needed money—fast—and it just so happened that one of the biggest breweries in the Midwest was launching a restaurant and looking to hire. So it was that the forty-something tenured professor found himself waiting tables at a high-end restaurant situated in a Minneapolis brewery. And loving it.

Batt’s memoir conveys the challenge—and the satisfaction—of meeting the demands of a frenzied kitchen and an equally expectant crowd. The Last Supper Club reveals the ups and downs of a waiter’s workday and offers an insightful perspective on what makes a job good, bad, or great. For Batt, this job turns out to be considerably more fun, and possibly more rewarding, than his academic career, and his insider’s view of waiting tables extols the significance of our food and the places where we gather to enjoy it—or serve it.

Told with sharp humor, humility, and a keen sense of what matters, The Last Supper Club is an ode to life in a high-pressure restaurant, the relationships that get you to the night’s close, and finding yourself through—or perhaps because of—the chaos of it all.

Matthew Batt is author of the memoir Sugarhouse. His fiction and nonfiction have been featured in the New York Times, Outside Magazine, the Huffington Post, Tin House, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, and the Aspen Writers’ Institute, he teaches creative writing and English at the University of St. Thomas and lives in St. Paul with his family.

MEMOIR

$22.95 Cloth/jacket ISBN: 978-1-5179-1485-1

$22.95 Retail e-book ISBN: 978-1-4529-7012-7

OCTOBER

272 pages 1 b&w illustration 6 x 9 1/4