Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly

[Wilfrid]

2025, by Hannah Selinger. I am halfway through and surprised I haven't seen much discussion on line. It's a long, detailed memoir by a server-turned-sommelier that consistutes an even deeper dive than usual into the abusive and damaging life of restaurant workers. She doesn't spare herself; plenty of drinking, drugs and inappropriate behavior.

Having said that, Johnny Iuzzini is not going to like chapter five. And I am about to start the chapter on her time at Momofuku.

[Wilfrid]

The Momofuku chapter is vivid to anyone who more or less knew the people around the place.

I have to note the sentence on page 190 about one S. Plotnicki, which is inaccurate in terms of how an online forum might be funded, but nevertheless, tee hee ha ha nyah nyah.

[Orik]

Didn't she join Momofuku after the party was sort of over? 

[MitchW]

The problem, methinks, with these books, is that no one gives a shit any more.

21 minutes ago, Orik said:

Didn't she join Momofuku after the party was sort of over? 

I'm pretty sure.

[MitchW]

I just read this entire piece, which I think is supposed to be funny, and didn't even chuckle...https://www.grubstreet.com/article/hannah-selinger-grub-street-diet.html

[Wilfrid]

2 hours ago, Orik said:

Didn't she join Momofuku after the party was sort of over? 

There the same time as Cory, so I don't know.

[Orik]

Ok I read that chapter, the timeline makes little sense to me but what's a bit of fiction between friends? Won't Plotz sue her? 🤣

[Simon]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/books/review/laurie-woolever-care-and-feeding.html

One problem with outrage, an extremely salient problem as it turns out, is exhaustion from it. Selinger opens her book pre-aggrieved. In fact, the book seems to have sprung like Zeus from the loins of titanic anger, or at least from an Eater article.

She sees slights like Kendrick sees dead people. She is “assaulted” by the smell of petits fours. Her lovers are manipulative “men who wanted to suck from me the things that were useful to them, leaving behind only my shell, my carapace.”

Everyone catches it in “Cellar Rat.” Gwyneth Paltrow is an “icy little troll.” Jimmy Fallon “claimed to be allergic to mushrooms, and possibly that was true or possibly he was just one of those people who lied to save face so that he could avoid copping to the fact that he was one of those people who didn’t like a food that most people did like.”

The chief executive of the BLT restaurant group is “Jewish and kept kosher and he loved to show up at the restaurant with a wad of bills so thick it actually hurt to watch him.” The food guide pioneer Tim Zagat is, without explanation, “rotund, grotesque.” It’s the early aughts and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is repulsive, the farm-to-table movement a sham, and Colleen, a manager at Bar Americain with “straight and oily” hair who fires Selinger for texting during work, “the kind of restaurant lifer who hated people like me — newbies, people who fit in seamlessly for no good reason.”

“Cellar Rat” feels at times like a charmless mix of Joris-Karl Huysmans, M.F.K. Fisher and Regina George. A blurb describes the book as “brutally honest,” but there’s a thin line between brutal honesty and glib brutality. These are lessons I wish Selinger could have had a chance to pick up from Tony Bourdain, and ones Woolever certainly did.

Selinger’s foundational trauma is a problematic sexual encounter with the pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini. She renders the episode in explicit, outraged detail but also with a frustrating veil of vagueness.

The difficulty for the reader, however sympathetic, is that the incident doesn’t occur until halfway through the book, by which point our outrage meter has been somewhat decalibrated by so much relentless flippancy — and if this is what cemented or changed her attitudes, that’s not clear, either.

To make matters more confusing, each chapter ends on a recipe. For instance, “Chapter 5: Fourplay,” which contains the Iuzzini episode, finishes with a recipe for Bittersweet Chocolate Cream Pie. It’s not quite as bad as Batali’s mea culpa with accompanying recipe for pizza dough cinnamon rolls, but it’s equally baffling.

Unbelievably, in her acknowledgments, Selinger ends her book by dedicating it to the people of Gaza. “This book is yours too,” she writes. But, quite frankly, I doubt they would want it.

[small h]

Dayum.

[Orik]

Snarky but not wrong 

[Wilfrid]

I can see where that review comes from; but the book is highly readable.

This, for example, may or may not be true, but it's funny: Gwyneth Paltrow is an “icy little troll.”