Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly

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.)