cover image Life of a Restaurant: Tales and Recipes from La Colombe D'Or

Life of a Restaurant: Tales and Recipes from La Colombe D'Or

Helen Studley, George Studley. Crown Publishers, $27.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-517-58313-5

``The dream of someday owning a restaurant is not unlike a sexual fantasy: most people don't really want it to come true,'' notes Studley. But since fantasizing about restaurantship is no less widespread than other adult reveries, this memoir is refreshment. In the wry tone of a longtime New Yorker, Studley reviews many facets of running a restaurant--coping with overzealous regulatory agents and capricious chefs, the grim facts of the exterminating business and garbage collection. She and her husband came to the restaurant business not as chefs, but as entrepreneurs, giving this book more interest than the typical celebrity chef cookbook. The Studleys have hired not one celebrity chef, but half a dozen, with seven middling-to-awful chefs in the intervening periods. After all, their place--La Colombe d'Or--has been in business for more than 15 years, and in Manhattan, that's a lifetime. As a result, Studley has handled the transitions, from fledgling newcomer hoping for the first review in the New York Times to seasoned professional knowing when to say ``no'' to Merv Griffin's offer of a name-drop on TV in exchange for a ``free lunch.'' Never mind the 60-plus recipes offered: this book could be reprinted for years as a textbook introduction to restauranting's realities. Perhaps the book's sole flaw lies--as does its charm--in its subjectiveness. A chapter on assessing the ``competition'' seems to rely more on how the Studleys, favored guests, are treated, than on the experiences of ordinary customers. (May)