For two hundred years, a rogues' gallery of chefs, line cooks, and dishwashers have slaved away, largely unseen, to serve the dining public. Their pedigrees reach back to the first restaurants during the reign of France's Louis XVI and extend to the Delmonico brothers in New York, Escoffier in Paris, and, in Fried: Surviving Two Centuries in Restaurants, a renegade cook in Minneapolis walking like a duck with a whole, raw salmon on his head.

Author and professional chef Steve Lerach first stepped through the swinging kitchen doors when he was in high school, starting as a...