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"Ludwig Bemelmans was the original bad boy of the New York hotel/restaurant subculture," writes Anthony Bourdain, Bemelmans's modern-day counterpart, in his introduction to this witty and engaging collection of semi-autobiographical tales. Bemelmans, known to many as the author of the Madeline books, was also a busboy, waiter, and then restauranteur whose recordings of behind-the-scenes kitchen life at the grand hotels in 1920s and 1930s New York never fail to amuse.

The twenty-six stories in Hotel Bemelmans, accompanied by seventy-three of Bemelmans's original, charming drawings, brilliantly evoke the kitchens, back passages, dining rooms, and banquet halls of the author's years at the Hotel Splendide - a thinly disguised stand-in for the Ritz Carlton. And what a strange, fabulous, and sometimes terrible universe it is, populated by rogues, con-men, geniuses, craftsmen, lunatics, gypsies, tramps, and thieves, among others.