Sweetbitter--by Stephanie Danler

Tess, a small towner from the Midwest, moves to the big apple for a taste of how the other half lives.
With no plan or artistic talents to explore, she lands an aisle seat to the lifestyle of the rich and famous from the vantage point of a backwaiter--that's New York for bus boy--at a ritzy restaurant known for its
eclectic menu and rare wines.
The novel charts the ingenue's rite of passage in the quirky hard knocks world of a popular New York restaurant until she's wise and ready to transcend her debutante stage.
Stephanie Danler, drawing from her behind the stage experience at an upper crust NY eatery, details
the nuances and specificity of precision food prep, the science and art of wine tasting with an alacrity that equally extolls and undermines the rarefied lives of the privileged. Danler's narrative style is rich and lavishly textured that it makes even passages about a food inspection riveting.
As Tess, the protagonist, delves deeper into the day laborer's life of a carnival of excess with food, drugs, and liquor in the after hours, while her work day consumes her in details and obedience in learning a thankless craft of servitude to the rich and powerful that it can be likened to a geisha's life, there's certainly more bitter to the occasional sweet.
Understandably young, impressionable, and lonely, Tess falls for a brooding narcissistic damaged goods of a guy who rings every alarm for the reader at first glance. There are pages and pages of this rather short novel dedicated to pangs of obsessive infatuation that would seem excessive to a female prisoner in solitary confinement. Yet, I endured them for even ridiculous lovesickness is endearing with ace prose.
Her last act at the restaurant felt like a dessert with wrongly paired wine. Sweetbitter indeed. But the unintended lesson for me is how the cold heartless corporate machine brainwashes these laborers into believing in a higher purpose of aesthetic loftiness when the hard fact is, they're being ground out like at
bootcamp for slave wages and benefits so the entitled can feel more deserved and pampered. The hell with these French-named NY restaurants. The next time I go there, I'm hunting down hole in the wall, mom and pop places where the owner will bring your food and tell you their story as you taste their homestyle goodness.
May be an image of drink and text that says 'SWEETBITTER A NOVEL STEPHANIE DANLER'
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