What is Michelle Wildgen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Michelle Wildgen, author of Bread and Butter.

Her entry begins:

I’m prepping for a food writing class I’ll teach in a couple of months, which means I’m reading a lot of delicious stuff like Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must Have Been Something I Ate. Steingarten is one of my great favorites for his incredible erudition, laugh-out-loud wit, and wide range of interests. He’s witnessed pig slaughters in France, immersed himself (almost literally, one suspects) in choucroute garnie in Alsace, and tortured a series of assistants with a never-ending series of...[read on]

About Bread and Butter, from the publisher:

Kitchen Confidential meets Three Junes in this mouthwatering novel about three brothers who run competing restaurants, and the culinary snobbery, staff stealing, and secret affairs that unfold in the back of the house.

Britt and Leo have spent ten years running Winesap, the best restaurant in their small Pennsylvania town. They cater to their loyal customers; they don't sleep with the staff; and business is good, even if their temperamental pastry chef is bored with making the same chocolate cake night after night. But when their younger brother, Harry, opens his own restaurant—a hip little joint serving an aggressive lamb neck dish—Britt and Leo find their own restaurant thrown off-kilter. Britt becomes fascinated by a customer who arrives night after night, each time with a different dinner companion. Their pastry chef, Hector, quits, only to reappear at Harry's restaurant. And Leo finds himself falling for his executive chef-tempted to break the cardinal rule of restaurant ownership. Filled with hilarious insider detail—the one-upmanship of staff meals before the shift begins, the rivalry between bartender and hostess, the seedy bar where waitstaff and chefs go to drink off their workday—Bread and Butter is both an incisive novel of family and a gleeful romp through the inner workings of restaurant kitchens.

Learn more about the author and her work at Michelle Wildgen's website.

The Page 99 Test: You’re Not You.

The Page 69 Test: But Not for Long.

The Page 69 Test: Bread and Butter.

Writers Read: Michelle Wildgen.

--Marshal Zeringue