Cellar Rat

Most people who do others dirty don’t bank on their victims landing a book deal. But that’s how it played out for Hannah Selinger. Cellar Rat, her first book, recounts in vivid detail a period in her twenties when she worked in several storied New York restaurants as a sommelier. Restaurant work is the filling in a sandwich—a period between completing an MFA in writing from Columbia University and eventually pursuing a career as a writer. 

The story has the cadence of a well-orchestrated Friday night dinner service. Selinger writes with candor and humor about events most people want to forget and has the backbone to put name tags on everyone present. Some details will rattle even well-seasoned restaurant employees. Her commitment to self-interrogation messes with the view that this is revenge-porn. 

Selinger demonstrates how her experience of childhood domestic abuse laid the groundwork for her attraction to restaurant culture. A business where there is no shortage of entitled men is alluring. As a young woman, the imprint of early abuse by her stepfather leaves her with weak boundaries, an inability to see red flags, and an attraction to predators. The pressures she writes about in the chapter, Theft, are heartbreaking. It’s hard not to burst into flames reading Fourplay and Chef Fucker. She uses a wide-angle lens to bring the enablers into focus. Among the many loathsome characters, this threesome is remarkable: 

“I imagined Tosi, Chang, Salmon, a rat pack of outright and internalized misogyny, gossiping about my dalliance with Johnny, aching to make some ill-timed joke at my expense. If the point was to cut me down so that I would know my place in the managerial hierarchy, the trick had worked.”

Cellar Rat is a forthright and progressive examination of addiction and restaurant culture. There are bottoms Selinger has to crawl out of. It’s a messy and emotional journey. “I began to understand that restaurant work might be hurting me,” she writes. 

Terrible events are eventually transformed by humility into instructive lessons. Selinger wakes up to all the ways restaurant culture denies women their appetites and agency. You will cheer when she retrieves what the Momofuku team tries to erase of her. You might wish she was putting the last nail in the coffin of celebrity chef culture, but as she writes, “Restaurants remain broken.”

In the end, Selinger grows up, takes the necessary steps to realize her dreams, and lays claim to her story. 

If you have the means, buy it for yourself in a local bookstore. A writer still gets dollars if you take it out of the library. It’s a book to put in the hands of young servers and cooks. 

***
 
Good peppers are often on the discount rack. Friday night, I roasted them with anchovies, garlic, rosemary, capers, olive oil, and seasoning as prep for Sunday night pasta. Then, I made a messy and delicious trout, crispy rice, watercress, carrot, and pickled beet salad with a ginger-sesame dressing. It was fresh and tasted like double happiness. 
 
A friend sent me a Beast Pizza gift certificate for my birthday—that was Saturday dinner sorted.
 
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I had trouble settling on music, but these two songs fit the sentiment of this week. On Your Side came to me on Saturday from someone I follow on Bluesky. It’s lovely. 

The Catalpas in winter look like morel mushrooms. I stare out the window a lot.

Tree Writing by Aaron Walker.

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Rebecca Solnit writing about Orwell’s retreat from London from An Inventory of Pleasures in Orwell’s Roses:

“Some called his migration to this remote location suicidal or masochistic, and many who have written about him seem to consider living in London an eminently reasonable thing to do and living out on a Scottish island unreasonable. They seem to assume that reasonability meant eking out as long a life as possible rather than living it as fully as possible. Orwell all along had tended to choose the latter over the former. And the air of London, filthy with coal smoke, was itself deadly in ways rarely acknowledged in his lifetime, particularly for someone with his underlying pulmonary conditions.”

“As the Rose-Hip to the Rose” is more beautiful writing.

***

This is how I describe what I’m doing right now. I spend most of my days sifting through the municipal-sized dump that is the internet, searching for small shards — photos, quotes, death notices, anything adjacent. Here’s what I’ve learned from sifting:

1.  The tech collaborators have turned Google into an Amazon mall.
2.  Image search is a vast wasteland, thanks to Pinterest and Alamy. 
3.  The app quenching my bibliography thirst is Zotero. 

That I have access to so much is a miracle. Tech is good up to the point of hyperbole. Those bros know how to write a press release. 

I’m grateful for what I can find online, but increasingly, it has limits. There is more out there beyond the reach of wireless. Who doesn’t like a library or archive? Or visiting a spot you’ve read about to add a geographic and cultural layer to your knowledge?  

The tip of the iceberg poking out of the water is the writing after. There are many days when I think I’m not doing any of it right. Sometimes for good reason. Still sifting for shards and my true voice. 

​***

I’m in my broccoli, pea shoots, oyster mushroom, sushi rice, and eggs phase of life, There’s an occasional can of tuna or sardines in olive oil and lemon from Spain with a side of Finnish crackers and a now-and-then bowl of pasta. I make Hooni Kim’s Chojang with extra garlic and ginger. It is capital F fresh. You want his cookbook. I’ve made enough from it to recognize a labour of love. I’m sure that has a great deal to do with the collaboration with Aki Kamozawa. 

It’s a healthy practice to purchase books and cookbooks through a local bookstore. Or test-drive it through a library. 
Step outside and go for a stroll. The first smell of spring is on the far-off horizon — still a few more storms to come.

​***

Nathaniel Rateliff and Gregory Alan Isakov sang me full of hope on Wednesday night — more roses. 
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Thinking about American farmers and the Gulf of Mexico. A young John Cougar Mellencamp in what we call up here a Canadian tuxedo kicking around a butterweed field with a good band backing him.