Cellar rat My life in the restaurant underbelly

Hannah Selinger fell into restaurants. After graduating from Columbia University, she moved home to Newburyport, Massachusetts, to figure out her next steps. She started working in a local restaurant and fell in love with the sense of fun and camaraderie there. She earned an MFA, moved back to New York City, and continued her life in the industry, not realizing the toxic lessons she was learning about how to live, how to be treated, and how to survive. In 2020, the public reckoning for several major chefs and industry men forced Selinger to reflect on her rise and fall in the restaurant industry. There were high points, like studying wine, finding joy in the origins of ingredients, and a featured role in a New York Times restaurant review. But there were dramatic lows: bullying at the renowned Momofuku Ssäm Bar, a chef who tried to nonconsensually record an intimate encounter, former employers blacklisting her, lost time with family. Selinger's vivid prose makes each chapter compulsively readable as she tells her story of life in restaurants.

Working in fancy restaurants starts as a heady rush but devolves into a dehumanizing grind, in this overwrought debut memoir from James Beard Award winner Selinger. The food writer recaps her post-college decade in the industry in the early 2000s, charting her path from waitressing at casual Massachusetts eateries to sommelier gigs at Manhattan fine-dining establishments including BLT Prime and Jean-Georges. She rhapsodizes about the "electric" atmosphere of upscale dining rooms, with their convivial glow, celebrity sightings (Gwyneth Paltrow "tipped ten percent, the icy little troll"), and employee camaraderie, and describes in richly evocative prose how she came to appreciate gourmet cuisine ("I could explain the softness of the meat, how lean it was, how it came from a less worked muscle of the cow"). Along the way, Selinger also catalogs the downsides: long shifts on erratic schedules, an after-hours drinking culture that got her a DUI conviction, and unpredictable, angry bosses. While the sections pertaining to the sexual harassment Selinger experienced and witnessed are harrowing, some of her overarching critiques of the industry as "brutal and unfair and traumatic" feel less potent, rooted more in petty slights than systemic failures. This provides a vivid glimpse behind the scenes of America's most glamorous dining rooms, but falls short as a polemic. (Mar.)

A survivor of top-end restaurant work tells all. Call it trauma therapy mixed with a few recipes: Selinger plainly states at the start that the kitchens where she's logged time, not least of them the vaunted Momofuku, did great psychic damage to her, "and moreover, how pervasive trauma can be when it is not taken seriously." Albeit somewhat less so than in a generation past, as survivors of that earlier era can attest, the culture of the high-end restaurant scene was the domain of celebrity chefs with massive egos and, in the case of a couple (she's looking at you, David Chang), the ability to throw monstrous tantrums intended to cow employees: "At Momofuku," Selinger writes, "toxicity was bred into the brand. There was an inhumanity to the work, but that was entirely the point: you were supposed to feel dispossessed of your humanness." In that, it's much like the Marines, but the Marines are less tolerant of sexual harassment, and Marines don't have to serve imperious clients who demand special attention and then leave skinflint tips on huge bills. (She's looking at you, Gwyneth Paltrow.) Much of the trauma that Selinger endures comes from the machinations of co-workers or the thoughtless class warfare of the moneyed clientele, but some was self-inflicted, as when she recounts a very bad decision about how to bury a colleague's pilferage. It's probably no consolation that some of the once de rigueur bad behavior on the part of celebrity chefs and owners is no longer permitted--witness Mario Batali--since Selinger is no longer part of the scene. "It has now been a decade since my final year in restaurants," she allows, which leaves the book with an exercise-in-settling-scores aftertaste. It's not Bourdain, but sensitive readers pondering a kitchen career might rethink it after reading this memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.