(FORTUNE Magazine) – So you've landed the vice presidency, you're spending tons of your company's money at the bistro of the moment, and the maitre d' still sniffs and seats you near the busboy. Now what? For those of us who lack the studied celebrity to merit a regular corner booth, there is a particular table you can secure in advance at many great restaurants. In fact, it's the best seat in the house, and it sits in a location that's surprisingly charming: the kitchen.

Chef's tables, as they're called, were first set in Europe, where cooks would feed their friends or the farmers who supplied their produce, serving their meals while still tending the vittles of the patrons at the front of the house. About a decade ago American chefs, longing for more contact with their customers (and those whose presence would beget even more customers), began installing tables in their own kitchens. Today there are at least a couple in most American cities.

While chefs understand what a great marketing tool these tables can be, do you really want to eat in the kitchen? After all, the point of going out for dinner, presumably, is to leave the pots and pans behind and get out of the house. But the kitchen itself is not the problem; there's a reason why cooking can be a hobby, while housework isn't. For those of us who can't peel a tomato properly but desperately want to learn, it's rather nice to watch an expert undress 50 of them.

In fact, for anyone who is at all curious about how the back rooms of great restaurants work, dining at a chef's table is an experience far superior to that of the dining room. Food should clearly be the sensory centerpiece of a great meal, and in the kitchen you're surrounded by it, from the raw meat searing on the grill as the flames shoot up toward the ceiling to the pungent air of garlic and wood smoke that your clothes take on over the course of the evening.

The access is nice too, for you are served not by waiters but by the chefs, so you can quiz them on what went into the dishes and how to reproduce them at home. You can wander around as well, quizzing the pastry chef on how to make spun sugar stand up on end and seeing what really goes into the sausage (don't worry, it's all good stuff at these kinds of establishments).

Chef's tables are isolated from the rest of the restaurant, which is terrific if you've just announced layoffs and need to watch your back. If you want to drink a lot and behave like a fool, you're free to do that too, for you won't offend any other diners. As for the kitchen staff, they've seen it all. A few years ago, four men at the Park Avenue Cafe (212-644-1900) in New York City kept tossing hundred-dollar bills on the table. After more than $1,000 had piled up, their wives were finally persuaded to bare their breasts for the cooks.

But the best thing about chef's tables is that they make good restaurants great. Take One Market in San Francisco (415-777-5577). Dinner in the dining room there is far from the best meal in the Bay Area. That honor remains with Chez Panisse in Berkeley, which has no chef's table. At One Market, however, dinner takes on a different dimension when you eat your five-course tasting menu in the kitchen (it costs $55, which doesn't include copious amounts of wine, hard to resist in Napa's backyard).

So how does restaurant real estate affect the taste? Take One Market's grilled quail, served with white truffle jus and a warm potato salad. In the dining room, the quail was overcooked, the kitchen skimped on the jus, and the salad wasn't warm. The next night the dish appeared to come from an entirely different restaurant. And it did, in a sense. "The chefs pay more attention to the food that goes to the chef's table," admits One Market's chef-owner, Bradley Ogden. "It's easier for them to feel they have some ownership in the restaurant when they can see their patrons."

Though One Market's tasting menu is long and varied, you're free to just point to stuff as it goes by in the kitchen and ask for it as well. As I poked around, one cook saw me salivating as he prepared the enormous hamburger from the bar menu. This man had the cardinal one-touch rule down pat: Place the burger on the grill, wait for the juices to emerge on top, touch it once to flip it, and for God's sake don't smash it down with the spatula so all the juices drizzle out. "Want one?" he asked proudly, in all seriousness. No, but by the time the French fries that go with it were cooked under our noses for the third time, we couldn't resist them, and the staff gladly delivered a bowlful.

Our meal ended with an assortment of desserts, including a memorable bowl of chilled cherry soup dotted with mini-scoops of mango sorbet. But what really caught my eye was the chocolate bread pudding, a dish that's almost always better cooked with basic ingredients in somebody's farmhouse in New England than it is when some West Coast joint gussies it up with organic millet bread and carob.

So I had my doubts. One Market's pastry chef makes his bread pudding with brioche, which is hard to find in a bakery, let alone make at home. Then he infuses it with Belgian chocolate and tops it with a bourbon saboyan sauce. It was the best bread pudding I've ever had, though it's hard not to overreact when its creator is watching for your reaction out of the corner of his eye.

In fact, that's one of the few things that can make the chef's table a bit uncomfortable. While the staff is under pressure to perform, it's tough to look them straight in the eye and send plates back that you haven't licked clean. So count on being rolled out in a wheelbarrow after you've finally finished. And while the banquette at One Market is comfortable, it gets toasty in there with all the stoves and such. But hey, if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

Have a favorite spot for road food you'd like to share, or a culinary topic that you'd like to suggest? E-mail Ron Lieber at 74774.3560@compuserve.com