Matthew Batt
Lee Stanford
A close-up of Matthew Batt.
Matthew Batt
It sounds like a plot for a novel, but it’s nonfiction. Matthew Batt takes a sabbatical from his teaching job but needs money; he finds himself waiting tables at a high-end brewery/restaurant and loving it. He’ll discuss The Last Supper Club, his memoir about the experience, with Madison’s own foodie/fiction writer, Michelle Wildgen. This is an in-person event and free but an RSVP is requested; a livestream is also available.
media release: Author Matthew Batt will be in Madison, WI to discuss his new memoir, The Last Supper Club: A Waiter's Requiem (University of Minnesota Press, PUB DATE: October 24, 2023) in conversation with local Madison author Michelle Wildgen at Mystery to Me (1863 Monroe Street, Madison, WI 53711) on Tuesday, January 23 at 6:00 PM CT. The event is free, but RSVP's are encouraged.
For more details, or to register, visit: https://www.mysterytomebooks.
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.
Telling the story of Batt’s early work in restaurants, including The New Yorker/Gastronomy Restaurant Group in Salt Lake City, The Last Supper Club then details his experiences at the fine dining restaurant, a job that continued well past his sabbatical—that lasted, in fact, right up to the restaurant’s sudden and unceremonious closing three years later, shortly after it was named one of the best restaurants in the country by Food & Wine.
Batt’s memoir conveys the challenge—and the satisfaction—of meeting the demands of a frenzied kitchen and an equally expectant crowd. Through training mishaps, disastrous encounters with confused diners, struggles to keep pace with far more experienced coworkers, mandatory memorizations of laundry lists of obscure ingredients, and the stress of balancing responsibilities at home and at work, 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.
A book signing will follow Batt's conversation, and books will be available for purchase.
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