To be a good restaurant employee is to be invisible. Hannah Selinger folded your napkin while you were in the bathroom. She slipped out through the side door after serving a meal worth more than her rent.
Cellar Rat chronicles Selinger’s rise and fall through New York’s dining world, from the gritty hometown pub where she fell in love with the industry to her final post at Nick & Toni’s in the Hamptons. In between: the lavish parties, the tasting courses, the wildly expensive wines, and the slow understanding that the romance of hospitality is, for the people providing it, mostly labour.
Where Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential saw the restaurant from the pass, Selinger sees it from the floor — the sommelier’s view, which is also the view of a woman navigating an industry that has historically treated visibility and authority as masculine prerogatives.
If you have ever worked a job where your competence was required to be seamless and your presence was required to be forgettable, this memoir will find the nerve.
