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.
"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. The memoir takes a behind-the-scenes
look at the adrenaline-fueled world of restaurant life, reverently
revealing all the care and thought that goes into a meal before the
plate is ever lowered before you. 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.
Matthew Batt describes restaurant work with such ferocious,
sweat-inducing clarity that I feel like I’m right back there, in
the weeds. 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 "Matthew Batt gets the details of high-end restaurant
life exactly right in this personal story of becoming a server: the
balance between home life and work life; the pressure inherent in
the business; the symbiotic but fraught relationship between
front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house. I love restaurant
stories, and this one I didn’t want to put down. It’s a
keeper."-Michael Ruhlman, author of The Soul of a Chef: The Journey
Toward Perfection "Matthew Batt's elegiac The Last Supper
Club is a tender yet clear-eyed portrait of a fiercely dedicated
community of restaurant lifers and the dreams they build, nurture,
and-often too briefly-inhabit. The most beautiful stuff in this
book taps into the almost primal wonder and magic so many of us
associate with our first experiences eating in restaurants and
being waited on by complete strangers. This book understands the
lingering spell of that experience better than anything else I've
read, and Batt is almost Proustian in mining his early memories of
food and restaurants. He also understands that alchemy is the one
true, worthy goal of any dreamer who opens a restaurant-or throws
themselves with real passion into working in one."-Brad Zellar,
author of Till the Wheels Fall Off
"There’s an impressive level of detail here, offering
insight into the nitty-gritty of restaurant labor for those who’ve
never worked in hospitality, while still feeling intimately
familiar to those who have done their time in the service
industry."-Eater "In this splendidly written book, Batt
demonstrates a gift for capturing the essence of his
coworkers."-Booklist "Catnip for anyone who has ever worked
in a restaurant."-The Washington Post
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