A Second Helping: Whining and Dining on Long Island picks up where Tom Schaudel’s first book, Playing With Fire, left off as a playful romp through the crazy world of restaurants, dining rooms, and professional kitchens. Filled with short stories of neurotic customers, stressed out servers, crazed cooks, and the undeniably unhinged, his unique and humorous observations will have you wondering how the expression, “The customer is always right,” ever came to be.
Looking back through a 50-year restaurant career, Schaudel has assembled a cast of characters that would be the envy of fiction writers everywhere. In this book, you will meet an f-bombing octogenarian, a D-level celebrity asking for separate checks at her wedding, an aspiring counterfeiter with a seriously flawed gift certificate, the nine-year-old antichrist, and a woman who flushed a six-carat diamond ring down a toilet bowl.
This latest collection is guaranteed to make you stay up late and laugh-out-loud and is a must read for anyone who has ever eaten in a restaurant, worked in a restaurant, asked to use the restroom in a restaurant or, God forbid, dreamed of owning a restaurant.
After working in restaurants since the age of 15, graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1973, and training under accomplished chefs, Schaudel opened his first restaurant, Panama Hatties in 1983. Since then, he has been the driving force behind such acclaimed Long Island restaurants as Spring Close House (East Hampton), Downtown Grille (Montauk), 107 Forest Avenue (Locust Valley), Lemongrass and Tease (Roslyn), Coolfish (Syosset), Passionfish (Westhampton Beach), Starfish (Merrick), Kingfish (Westbury), Thom Thom (Wantagh), Jedediah Hawkins Inn (Jamesport), Amano (Mattituck), Alure (Southold), Jewel and Beju (Melville) and Plated Simply Events and Catering (Mattituck).
A Second Helping was release on July 13, 2022.
