About Every Restaurant Tells a Story – Tales of Film, Food and Fabulous Misadventures:
Every Restaurant Tells a Story is a dazzling work of autofiction where humor and heartbreak share the same table. Set against the glittering grit of 1980s Hollywood and the wider world beyond, this novel-in-stories follows a young woman determined to carve out a life in the film industry—armed with nothing more than nerve, bad timing, and an appetite for adventure. From smoky delis on Fairfax to the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, from Cape Town’s shattering realities to London’s velvet dining rooms, each chapter finds her seated at a new table where something deliciously unexpected occurs.
Here, restaurants are confessionals and stages, deals are inked over cocktails, and the people who shape us most arrive with the menu. Lovers, liars, legends, and lost souls populate the rooms—some glamorous, some dangerous, all unforgettable. Beneath the sparkling wit lies deeper resonance: isolation masked as confidence, ambition disguised as survival, and the high cost of reinvention in a world where image can devour identity.
Told with the charm of Eve Babitz and the emotional bite of David Sedaris, this is a portrait of a woman learning to live with the chaos she creates and the grace she discovers. Every Restaurant Tells a Story is a cinematic, big-hearted feast of a novel—proof that sometimes the best meals come with the messiest memories, and that the places we eat become the places that change us.
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Author Bio:
Dianne Reeves Angel is a novelist and former film industry insider based in Lake Tahoe. A graduate of UCLA with a BA in English Literature, she spent more than ten years working behind the scenes in Hollywood, with positions at Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and New World Pictures, contributing to the development and production of films and television series throughout the 1980s. Her debut novel-in-stories, Every Restaurant Tells a Story (Lost Telegram Press), draws on those years to create a work of fiction that blends wit, pathos, and cinematic flair—an insider’s feast of martinis, movie deals, and misadventure set in iconic restaurants around the world. Her writing celebrates the messy, magical intersections between food, film, and the search for belonging. When she’s not writing, she’s cooking, traveling, or hosting author readings in the very places where her stories are set.