Phoebe Damrosch (or her publisher) tries to serve her cake and eat it too by positioning Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter as a devil-wears-a-toque memoir about working in the dining room at Thomas Keller’s Per Se in the Time Warner Center, where the menu features precious delicacies like torchon of foie gras with spiced winter fruits.

“May contain material offensive to Republicans, vegans, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and those on a low-sodium diet,” Ms. Damrosch—who rose from backserver to become the ultra-swank restaurant’s only female captain—cautions tantalizingly in her introduction.

But only the highly sensitive could be offended by this tame tell-all. The “eavesdropping” promised in the subtitle angles not to pick up juicy tidbits of conversation, but to serve customers better. One example Ms. Damrosch offers: If as she poured water she overheard a guest mentioning a preference for fruit over chocolate, she was to report it to the table’s captain, who would switch the diner’s dessert on the tasting menu.

There’s also plenty of swooning over Ms. Damrosch’s love interest, André the sommelier, and over New York Times critic Frank Bruni, whom she served four separate times, only to be dismissed in his four-star review because “the vigilant staff repeatedly recognized me and kept a special watch over my table.”

This lack of bite means the book misses the chance to stand as a front-of-the-house version of visceral restaurant kitchen exposés like Bill Buford’s Heat and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Instead, Service Included will appeal most to the already indoctrinated, meaning fellow high-end restaurant workers, culinary students and foodies with a fierce interest in fine dining. (Even they, however, are likely to cringe at the condescending “Tips” at the end of each chapter that run along the duh-inducing lines of “Don’t send something back after eating most of it.”)

With her pleasantly light tone, Ms. Damrosch affords a wide view of the enormous amount of work that goes into opening a restaurant of Per Se’s caliber. Staff education covered esoteric topics such as “wild mushrooms, the difference between Iranian and Russian caviar, and the ideal brewing techniques for black, green, and white tea.” Ms. Damrosch depicts these efforts so well that when a fire breaks out early on and firefighters have to chop up a $250,000 stove to extinguish it, readers feel Thomas Keller’s pain.

And Ms. Damrosch does dish a little about customers, though no names are named. Even the supposed bad behavior tends to the mild—think old men nodding off over glasses of Madeira—with the exception of one longtime customer’s delighted description of the “new thing” in scatological sex play. In the same chapter, Ms. Damrosch offers a field guide to celebrities: “On the whole, celebrities seem to have a large cranium—literally big heads.” But which large-skulled star prompted this observation remains a mystery. As in the rest of this too-kind memoir, the dangled promise of gossip goes unfulfilled, leaving the reader hungry for something more flavorful.

Natalie Danford is the author of a novel, Inheritance (St. Martin’s), and co-editor of the Best New American Voices series.

Like Mr. Bourdain, Ms. Powell lets it all hang out; but in place of Mr. Bourdain’s annoying braggadocio, she displays a self-deprecating vulnerability that makes her memoir not only entertaining but often poignant. Julie and Julia, which began life as a blog, might have deteriorated into a series of kitchen bloopers—or worse, into the boringly meta business of writing about blogging. But Ms. Powell happily avoids all that.

Co-starring as Ms. Powell’s official taster is her husband, Eric, a target of both affection and frustration. Ms. Powell’s marriage to her high-school sweetheart (“straight out of one of the ickier films from the John Hughes oeuvre”) seems happy on balance, but there ought to be a word for urban women like her who marry in their early 20’s. These anti–Carrie Bradshaws often find themselves at loose ends. At the start of the book, Ms. Powell is 29, living in a deadly-sounding part of Long Island City, and she has just abandoned her halfhearted attempts at acting and accepted a full-time office job after years of temping. She’s not ready (yet) to have the baby that an astonishing number of people propose as a time-filler. So while her unmarried peers are looking for Mr. Big, Ms. Powell is looking for a Big Project.

Her newfound employment is key, and not just because it drives her into the beefy arms of Julia Child: Ms. Powell is a secretary for the government agency responsible for Ground Zero. She is blessedly unafraid to tackle this sensitive subject, often with macabre humor, as when she describes as part of her duties answering phone calls from the likes of “the housebound lady in Staten Island who is sure her idea for the memorial is being stolen by some big architect somewhere because the picture she saw in the paper looks just like the collection of crystal paperweights she keeps in her knickknack hutch.” Like one of her skittish cats, Ms. Powell wisely approaches the subject sideways, never bluntly.

In a chapter titled “Hacking the Marrow Out of Life,” she describes the surreal nature of coming home from work on the first anniversary of 9/11 (a designation that to her ears “sounds like a deodorant or something”), after being forced—along with all the other female Democratic employees in the office—to man the conference room where the relatives of the lost stood to view the site. From that psychologically bloody scene, Powell heads home to extract the marrow from a hard-to-find bone, a process that involves a jigsaw, a paring knife and an insane amount of work—and yields less than two tablespoons of “gluey clots of stuff, that plopped down onto the cutting board with a sickening sound.” Meat, as the old PETA slogan and a Smiths album informed us, is murder.

Eggs are murder, too, at least when Ms. Powell cooks them. She describes her attempt at oeufs à la Bourguignonne thusly: “The kitchen was a crime scene. Eggshells littered the floor, crackling underfoot. What looked like three days’ worth of unwashed dishes were piled up in the sink, and half-unpacked boxes had been shoved to the corners of the room. Unseen down the dark throat of the trashcan, yet as conspicuous as tarpaulin-covered murder victims, were the mutilated remains of eggs. If the purplish-stained shreds of yolk clinging stickily to the walls had been blood spatters, a forensics specialist would have had a field day.”

The book can be as chaotic as her kitchen. There’s no overarching structure; Ms. Powell doesn’t cover one recipe per chapter or anything that simple. But the chaos leaves her room to roam, and she has a circuitous—and disarming—way of coming back to the original point.

She does wander a little too far when she conjures up snippets of Julia Child’s life: Julia’s false pregnancy alarm, Julia’s first time meeting her husband. These italicized sections, as sweet as the eight tarts Ms. Powell bakes in a single heroic night, are the weakest part of the book (and mercifully short).

Despite those slips into hagiography, Ms. Powell is no sycophant. She loses her patience with Child’s smug instructions and takes offense when she hears that Child (who died last year at 91) thought her project silly at best.

Perhaps Child missed the point because Julia lacked the confessional gene that Julie has in spades. It’s hard to picture the patrician Child leaning in close to cop to twice selling her own oeufs (Ms. Powell needed the $7,500 to pay off credit card debt, she says); or sneaking off as a young girl to page through two forbidden books: Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Joy of Sex. One “smelled smoky and astringent and secret,” while the other “is still capable of striking deep if obscure zones of discomfort.” (Answer key: Joy is the smoky one; Mastering the discomfiting one.)

The pairing of these two iconic books brilliantly evokes what makes Julie Powell’s memoir such a stand-out: Like Julia, Julie recognizes that cooking is about responding to animal appetites—and it isn’t for wusses. Or, as she wrote in her blog early on, eating heartily and well “blows heirloom tomatoes and first-press Umbrian olive oil out of the fucking water.” Julie and Julia satisfies immensely, and calls to be consumed in large, gluttonous mouthfuls.

Natalie Danford, editor of the Best New American Voices series, reviews books for People magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times and many other publications.

If you're nostalgic for the days when talk of the military brought to mind images of derring-do and not the black-hooded figures of Abu Ghraib, you'll cotton to Eric Chase Anderson's sweet boy's adventure tale, Chuck Dugan Is AWOL, which bears the curious subtitle, "A Novel with Maps."

That description isn't inaccurate, just slightly narrow. Mr. Anderson's story of an intrepid 18-year-old on the lam from the Naval Academy in order to stop his mother, Fraunces, from marrying an unsavory character known as "The Admiral," as he simultaneously seeks the hidden treasure his father has left for him, isn't quite a graphic novel-but the narrative isn't text-driven, either.

The "maps" are underserved by the subtitle. Sometimes they're depictions of terrain or blueprints of boats or houses, but just as often they're carefully rendered, cunning drawings of items with their parts neatly labeled. A one-inch-by-one-inch black-and-white thumbprint, for example, has markings like "fresh scar (boat-hook?)" and "ulnar loop." A representation of Dugan's favorite drink, a Panama Canal, lists the ingredients required to make it (three parts rum to one part curaçao, a tablespoon of bitters and coconut shavings) and also points out the garnish of papaya on a miniature sword and the pilfered yacht-club tumbler that contains it. Dugan escapes peril on a "powered submersible bicycle," diagrammed with fins, a faux water bottle that's actually an ink bomb and an underwater propeller.

The maps do more than illuminate the minutiae of Dugan's adventures. Without the drawings, this would be a simple, plot-heavy mystery (forget about character-we learn zero about Dugan's past, or that of his comrade, Ensign Sally Wisebadger); it could pass for a young-adult book. Once you add the drawings, you get a curiously appealing package-just right for adults-that tests the waters of twee before drawing back its toes.

Mr. Anderson is the brother of filmmaker Wes Anderson, and the family resemblance shows-he displays the same quirky sensibility you'll find in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums (the latter film and its DVD packaging featured some of Eric's art).

Like his brother's movies, however, Eric Anderson's book occasionally feels like an exercise in style rather than substance. If the detailed drawings are a delight, the text of Chuck Dugan Is AWOL-displayed in a typewriter font-is comparatively flat and thin. Despite the satisfyingly stiff, heavy paper, this is a quick, light read.

But the gentle humor and sincerity of the illustrations more than compensate. A vaguely New Yorker –ish map of Dugan lost in the Atlantic consists mostly of blank blue, with a dot in the center and an arrow pointing to it that simply says "Chuck." A map of a harbormaster's office offers an aerial view of a coat rack, a Franklin stove, a swivel chair and a cup of coffee.

The cleverest illustrations are those of Dugan himself. One shows him with a grown-out crew cut, striped shorts with a buck knife strapped to the waistband, and a green tattoo-featured in an inset-of his family's crest (two seahorses flanking a deep-sea diver's helmet). Another is a skeleton with Dugan's various injuries-which include broken ribs and a missing wisdom tooth-clearly marked. At one point, Fraunces flashes on her son at various ages, including a flash-forward to Dugan at 60. In each illustration, he wears a patch over his left eye-at 6 because he's been the victim of a cat scratch, at 60 thanks to "enemy fire." In yet another, Dugan-a master of disguise-dresses as a pipe-smoking Marine with a missing right arm (the labels explain that he's wearing a desert scout hat and his grandfather's boots); then he inadvertently uses his right hand to grasp something and the jig is up.

Everyone's endearing-the members of the military and the villains, too. This is a book where people say things like, "Don't mention it, mac" and "That boy just broke his silly neck" without a hint of irony. At one point, Mr. Anderson admits that his story is implausible, as women were only allowed to enter the Naval Academy in 1976, which would make Sally Wisebadger impossible. The apology for that anachronism is surprising, given that the entire book feels divorced from history. When mention of "the War" arises, it's hard to figure out which one that would be-and it doesn't much matter as long as we get to look at Eric Chase Anderson's idiosyncratic and truly original drawings.

Natalie Danford is co-editor of the "Best New American Voices" series from Harvest/Harcourt, which showcases emerging writers.

In Ruth Reichl's first memoir, Tender at the Bone (1998), about her peculiar childhood, food was love. In her second, Comfort Me with Apples (2001), which covered her coming-of-age as a writer and a woman, food was sex. In her latest, Garlic and Sapphires, food is work-specifically Ms. Reichl's work as the restaurant critic of The New York Times from 1993 to 1999.

Though work may sound like the least thrilling of the three subjects, it's when Ms. Reichl writes about restaurants and reviewing them that she's at her sharpest. The 10 Times reviews reprinted here stand as fine examples of the genre, and not just for the schadenfreude of watching pricey Manhattan restaurants fail. Ms. Reichl's review of Le Cirque, for example, which is really two reviews in one-one of the restaurant when she's recognized and one when she's not-crystallizes something that non-famous patrons have long sensed. Her paean to the soba noodle house Honmura An, shocking when it appeared in 1993 for giving three stars to an Asian restaurant, is a study in subtlety, just like the restaurant itself.

Everybody's a critic, but Ms. Reichl is really good at it. Equally energetic and enjoyable are the back stories to the reviews, which add another dimension.

Yet a book consisting solely of restaurant reviews would be a bit thin, and there's a sense here that Ms. Reichl was unsure about what else to add. She clouds the consommé by tossing in 17 recipes (not from restaurants, but for home-cooked food like roast chicken and scalloped potatoes). It's a generous impulse ("This book is going to have recipes instead of pictures because I want you to be able to taste what I am talking about"), but many of the dishes are tangential to the narrative. The first one-for New York cheesecake-is never mentioned in the text at all.

The psychodrama of Ruth Reichl as a rebel among the stuffed shirts at The Times-in a trial-by-fire beginning, assistant managing editor Warren Hoge interviewed her from a hospital bed-simmers throughout but never boils over. After displaying a bare-all sensibility about her personal life in her two earlier memoirs, Ms. Reichl now appears reluctant to spill the beans about the goings-on at the Gray Lady. Most of the tidbits of catty gossip are unremarkable; few readers will be amazed to learn that food writer Amanda Hesser is "frighteningly ambitious."

Observer columnist Bryan Miller, who preceded Ms. Reichl as restaurant critic at The Times, gets the worst of it, but he's not exactly gutted. As revealed in letters leaked to the Post's Page Six, Mr. Miller disapproved of Ms. Reichl's work. But while in real life Ms. Reichl's strategy of choosing not to react and hoping the feud would fade seems sound, on the page it plays out limply. The only tension is supplied by Ms. Reichl's account of how every morning she bought a 50-cent doughnut from the coffee cart parked in front of The Times, but when Mr. Miller was around, she dumped the cheap treats without tasting them, worried that he'd out her as a lowbrow.

Instead of exploring the cause of her unhappiness in a job she claims never to have wanted, Ms. Reichl devotes a large number of pages-or maybe it just feels that way-to her son, Nicky. One of the highlights of Comfort Me with Apples was Ms. Reichl's tender writing about her desire to have a baby and her despair when an infant offered for adoption was subsequently taken away. That chapter ends with Ms. Reichl pregnant. Nicky was 4 1¼2 years old when Ms. Reichl transferred to New York, and in the pages of his mother's memoir, at least, he's a sitcom-style cutie pie who refers to Benihana as "the chop-chop place" and constantly tells his mom how beautiful she is, no matter how she's tricked out.

And tricked out she is-Ms. Reichl reveals here that she rarely visited restaurants as herself, but instead worked up elaborate costumes with wigs, makeup and clothing. To eat at the Four Seasons, she dressed as her own difficult mother, then found herself behaving like her mother as well. "[W]e all become actors, to some extent, when we go out to eat," Ms. Reichl insists, but few of us go this far-nor is it clear that it's wholly necessary. Most critics make reservations under different names and even take out pseudonymous credit cards, but in this telling, Ms. Reichl spends more time shopping for wigs than she does eating. The ease with which she claims to have fooled everybody-from her doorman to her husband to her officemates-both clearly delights her and rings false.

There's a bit of a fake undertone throughout. By definition, a memoir is an attempt to impose a narrative on a more or less random series of events, but Ms. Reichl may have crossed the line. In the acknowledgments, where such an admission might be easily overlooked, Ms. Reichl 'fesses up to having "taken many liberties that do not follow journalistic principles." Stinky Myron Rosen, the Weekend editor with horrendous body odor? He doesn't exist. Situations have been conflated, Ms. Reichl admits, dialogue recreated from memory, and exaggeration sprinkled liberally throughout.

This plants a kernel of doubt. The "blowsily attractive" waitress who sat next to Ms. Reichl on her flight to New York from Los Angeles and revealed that the newly hired critic's photo already hung in every restaurant kitchen in town, then helped herself to Ms. Reichl's airline meal, suddenly seems suspiciously convenient. On first reading, an episode in which Ms. Reichl, disguised as a sexy blonde, picks up a strange man, takes him to Lespinasse and allows him to "teach" her superciliously about fine food seemed an indication that the author was in need of therapy. In retrospect, it was probably just one of those conflated events.

As a restaurant critic, Ms. Reichl never hedged: She told it like it tasted. That's why her reviews stand up so well over time. But in writing about her career at The Times, she's too coy, and drains away some of the flavor, making what could have been a juicy memoir into a much tamer collection of columns, minimally embellished.

Natalie Danford is a restaurant and book critic who has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times and many other publications.