ave you ever gone to a restaurant with high expectations and came out disappointed with a bit of an "was that it?"-attitude. Sadly this book left this reviewer in a bit of a quandary as the hype and expectation was not matched by the delivery. If it was a meat course, it would have been sent back to the kitchen with a few harsh words for the chef. The concept should be compelling. A number of rather outlandish incidents taken from many top restaurants and their kitchens are anonymised and consolidated into an elongated diary-like book. You should be shocked, amazed and possibly cowered by the revelations within, creating a difficulty to look at another restaurant in the same light again. It is just the execution and the packaging of this book left a lot to be desired. To use a culinary analogy, it felt like it went off the boil or a meal, comprising of great ingredients, was somehow mangled into something less stellar in the kitchen. After a while this reviewer found himself tuning out of the text that seemed to take an age to get to the point of a story. Clearly when you are mixing together a number of stories you need to get the balance right, to get the foundations in place, to make the flavours really shine. It just felt like this book tried but failed. It could be a good supermarket bread but it fails at being a truly wonderful artisanal handmade loaf that is really more-ish. You need to manage your expectations accordingly