Legwork Team Publishing Announces the Release of Playing with Fire by Renowned Chef and Restaurateur Thomas G. Schaudel

Legwork Team Publishing announces the forthcoming release of Playing with Fire: Whining and Dining on the Gold Coast by renowned chef and restaurateur Thomas G. Schaudel. Playing with Fire will be available wherever fine books are sold on January 15, 2009.

East Meadow, NY (PRWEB) November 14, 2008 -- Legwork Team Publishing announces the forthcoming release of Playing with Fire: Whining and Dining on the Gold Coast by renowned chef and restaurateur Thomas G. Schaudel. Playing with Fire will be available wherever fine books are sold on January 15, 2009.

In Playing with Fire, ( ISBN: 978-1-6048-1363-0, Hardcover - $29.95, Trade paper - $19.99) Schaudel provides a chef's eye view into the crazy world of the restaurant culture. Filled with hilarious vignettes about difficult customers, harried wait-staff, stressed out cooks, and the truly disturbed, Playing with Fire is a witty, cynical, and wildly entertaining romp through Schaudel's forty plus years in the business.

Through the no-holds-barred narrative, you will meet a hilarious cast of characters, including a ninety year old woman who just happens to be a serial "bird flipper," a woman stealthily trying to drag a twenty-foot Christmas tree out of the restaurant undetected, an elderly gentleman who walked out with a large metal clipboard menu holder stuffed down his pants, and a woman who got drunk, passed out, got revived, and aced an intervention in the span of under twenty minutes.

Playing with Fire invites you to meet all of those people who torture restaurant workers on a daily basis--seemingly just for sport: the neurotics, the psychotics, the allergic, the afflicted, the affected, the manic, and the deeply depressed. From the Atkins disciples to the South Beach diet crowd, from the anemic, the bulimic, the bingers, the purgers to the gastro-intestinal groupies, and all of the dreamers, the schemers, the screamers, and the 'is-that-made-with-cream'-ers in between, Playing with Fire has them all. Cleverly illustrated and peppered with Schaudel's recipes, Playing with Fire is an engaging, enlightening, entertaining, and uproariously funny soup-to-nuts tale that will leave readers begging for the next course.

In the book's Foreword, Nelson DeMille writes, "Playing with Fire is a little like Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, but actually better. Why? Because the kitchen is only half as interesting as the dining room. This may be the first culinary book that ever sliced, diced, and filleted the customers. And you can't make this stuff up. I mean, I am absolutely positive that each and every story in Playing with Fire is not only true, but also toned down a bit to protect the identity of the guilty."

Born in Queens, New York, and raised on Long Island, Thomas Schaudel began his career as a dishwasher and the age of fifteen. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1973. Schaudel has been the driving force behind such restaurants as: 107 Forest Ave., Lemongrass, Downtown Grille and Wine Bar, Tease, Passionfish, Starfish, Spring Close House, and Thom Thom and Maxwell's. His current lineup includes Coolfish, The Jedidiah Hawkins Inn, Gabrielle's, and a Mano. A sought-after media guest, Schaudel has been featured on the Food Channel, The Travel Channel, and numerous other television and radio programs. Thomas Schaudel lives on the East End of Long Island.

Legwork Team Publishing (www.legworkteam.com) is an independent book publisher headquartered in New York. To request an advance review copy of Playing with Fire, or an interview with Thomas G. Schaudel, please contact Maryglenn McCombs by phone - (615) 297-9875.

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