Test Kitchen

'Neil Stewart is the kind of writer who appears once in a generation, gifts fully-formed' Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting

Test Kitchen is set during a single evening's service at the Michelin-starred restaurant everyone's talking about, Midgard.

As Midgard's newest waitress, Australian-born Marley is glad to have found a kind of family among the 'brigade' there. Like any family, however, it is dysfunctional, possibly even lethal . . .

A violent event - an event she is struggling to piece together - has befallen Marley. She can't move. She can't speak. All she can do is observe the restaurant tonight, seeing but unseen. As she strains to recall what has happened to her, she can only witness the chaos that is about to unfurl here, a place ordinarily so precisely curated by Joanna, Midgard's famously enigmatic head chef . . .

Tense and moreish, Test Kitchen offers a deliciously dark insight into the goings-on behind the scenes in the kitchen, as well as eavesdropping in on the dramas of the diners who are lucky - or unlucky - enough to have booked a table at Midgard on what will prove to be its final night. Test Kitchen is a gripping, funny and often macabre story about the culture of food, of dining and eating, about feeding and nourishing, about mothers, mortality and magic.