Our enjoyment of restaurants is matched only by our outrage at what occurs in them. A decade after accusations against the chef Mario Batali ushered in the #MeToo era in the fine dining world, blowing the lid off years of ubiquitous industrywide abusive behavior, two memoirs lift up the kitchen mats and examine the scuzz the Bad Boy Chef Era left underneath.
The first, “Care and Feeding” by Laurie Woolever, is an intimate dispatch from an inside player. Woolever was both Batali’s assistant and, from 2009, Anthony Bourdain’s, until the latter’s death by suicide in 2018. She also worked on books with both men.
The other, “Cellar Rat,” by Hannah Selinger, is a howling account from the periphery. Selinger worked as a server and sommelier at a few marquee restaurants, then, briefly, as a beverage director for another bad boy chef, at David Chang’s Momofuku.
One is a fundamentally kind and generous book; the other, a petty and mean one. Which is which is easily surmised by the titles alone.
“Very few people are curious about the unknown women who prop up the work of important men,” Woolever writes. Since she worked with two of them, it would have been easy for their shadows to stretch over Woolever’s own. But they don’t.
Nor are they depicted as caricatures. Batali, for his part, appears as a generous bully and charismatic tormentor. Bourdain is extremely kind, a little neurotic, somewhat tortured and, toward the end of his life, seemingly bewitched.
Woolever, who wrote “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography,” manages to divulge nuggets of his life that don’t seem like weird post-mortem veneration. (His outgoing message on his answering machine, for instance, was Elvis Costello’s “Alison.”)
She is a funny, acerbic and empathetic writer. One of the most refreshing aspects of “Care and Feeding” is that she doesn’t belabor the point that she was a hot mess. She simply inventories the handles of whiskey, rafts of gin and tonics, bottles of wine and cases of beer. She doesn’t say she’s a pothead; she’s just high from the moment she wakes up. And she doesn’t say she’s addicted to sex but is always having it, often sordidly, generally drunkenly, frequently with strangers, sometimes with colleagues. There’s little judgment, just consequences, which pile up like a car crash as the pages turn.
In this turn-of-the-century, food-and-media-world bildungsroman, we see Woolever move to New York, work as a gardener and as a private chef before attending culinary school. She becomes Batali’s assistant (the only one to apply for the job). “You want to be a food writer?” he asks her upon their first meeting. “I’ll introduce you to every editor in town. They’re all on my dick, trying to get a reservation.”
Batali emerges as a munificent, peevish, boorish, sadistic rizzmaster whose ever more outrageous antics are rapturously greeted by the public. Woolever, for her part, is mostly ride or die. She matches Batali bite for bite and drink for drink even while cannily noting his proclivity to humiliate and harass those around her.
But by the time she becomes Bourdain’s assistant, after stints writing and editing, Woolever is in a marriage doomed by her frequent infidelities and constant boozing. At some point, she stabs her husband in the leg with an earring and has sex with a gigolo in Tokyo. Not good.
Eventually, the dominoes begin to fall. First, Batali goes down publicly in a barrage of exposés. Then Woolever is exposed, privately. After finding a letter detailing her cheating, her husband ends the marriage. Somewhere along the way, almost miraculously, Woolever puts down the bottle(s).
But that’s just in time to deal with the death of Bourdain, here handled with little sentimentality and no sugarcoating: “He had made the colossally stupid but somehow wholly plausible decision to die of a broken heart.”
After sobriety, the book tilts toward Quit Lit. Woolever practices gratitude and prayer. While this arc retroactively casts the hitherto delightfully neutral account of her behavior into a redemption narrative, nothing can rob the book of its deep sense of empathy. She feeds. She cares. And we read and care too.
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 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, 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.
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