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, 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.
CARE AND FEEDING: A Memoir | By Laurie Woolever | Ecco | 342 pp. | $28.99
CELLAR RAT: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly | By Hannah Selinger | Little, Brown | 294 pp. | $29