Table Boss

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Jen Agg’s obsession with the restaurant business is comparable to the fervor of a literary novelist—you have to be driven to pay such close attention to so many small (but vital) details. Despising one’s critics goes with both enterprises. Her heartfelt love for her husband is the powerful subtext of this memoir—at once compelling and fun to read.”
—John Irving

“This book is a foolproof manual for radical confidence, offering recipes for success in everything from making chicken soup to making it through hell. Don’t be scared of life, Jen isn’t. Tall poppies, unite.”
—Emily Haines, singer-songwriter

“This is Jen Agg at her best: smart, funny, and formidable.”
—Monica Heisey, author of Really Good, Actually

“Reading this book is like going to one of Jen’s restaurants, it’s welcoming, gorgeous, and full of interesting people. Once you are seated, in these pages, you will find the most intimate conversation about love, friendship, relationships, and surviving a life-altering crisis. This book comes straight from the heart of a passionate artist. It’s as charming and sharp-witted, as it is challenging and brilliant. I loved it.”
—Claire Cameron, author of How to Survive a Bear Attack

“Table Boss is a tender memoir of marriage through sickness and health; a meditation on ambition, power and business; a primer on how to conduct oneself as a woman in a man’s world; a super-compelling and very funny book that will keep you reading long past bedtime. Jen Agg calls herself “battle ready” and she has long fought her detractors, whom I suspect of being angry that she is so very good at doing so many different things.”
—Laurie Woolever, author of Care and Feeding: A Memoir and Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography

“A gorgeously alive page-turner. Jen Agg rescripts what a memoir can hold with a direct-to-the-bloodstream read cut through with dark humour, wisdom and nerve. With the obsessive precision of the truly devotional, Agg captures the grit and vision required to build something iconic out of nothing and the clear-eyed grace that comes when one is forced to enter into and contend with the undercurrents of life. Table Boss is about lost, past, and new selves, about love as a force of salvation, about confessions and grudges—an opera with a poached chicken recipe at its centre.”
—Claudia Dey, author of Daughter