CELLAR RAT

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.