Description:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A thrilling novel of the senses and a coming-of-age tale, following a small-town girl into the electrifying world of New York City and the education of a lifetime at one of the most exclusive restaurants in Manhattan. • "Brilliantly written.... Outstanding." —The New York Times Book Review

Newly arrived in New York City, twenty-two-year-old Tess lands a job working front of house at a celebrated downtown restaurant. What follows is her education: in champagne and cocaine, love and lust, dive bars and fine dining rooms, as she learns to navigate the chaotic, enchanting, punishing life she has chosen.

The story of a young woman’s coming-of-age, set against the glitzy, grimy backdrop of New York’s most elite restaurants, in Sweetbitter Stephanie Danler deftly conjures the nonstop and high-adrenaline world of the food industry and evokes the infinite possibilities, the unbearable beauty, and the fragility and brutality of being young and adrift.

Review

"Brilliantly written. . . . Outstanding."—The New York Times Book Review

“Outstanding.” —Gabrielle Hamilton, The New York Times Book Review

“Vivid and exquisite.” —NPR

“[A] heady first taste of self-discovery, bitter and salty and sweet.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Meticulously rendered.” —Los Angeles Times

“Ravishing. . . . It tantalizes, seduces, satisfies.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Smart, delicious. . . . A sexy, sweaty book of sensory overload.” —The Washington Post

“[Sweetbitter] is going to make a lot of people hungry.” .—The New York Times

“A heady mix of youth, love, gastronomic delights and determined self-invention. . . . [Danler] is a writer of prodigious talent.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A raw, shucked, pungent, wild love story.” —Marie Claire

“Sexy, astute. . . . Anyone who’s ever tied on an apron will think, ‘Finally, someone wrote a book about us.’ And nailed it.” —People

“This dynamite book is filled with the heart-wrenching indignities of self-discovery, and gives a gritty, inside look to the fast-paced, drug-filled, whirlwind scene of restaurant life.” —Bon Appétit

About the Author

STEPHANIE DANLER is a writer based in Los Angeles, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I

You will develop a palate.

A palate is a spot on your tongue where you remember. Where you assign words to the textures of taste. Eating becomes a discipline, language-obsessed. You will never simply eat food again.

I don’t know what it is exactly, being a server. It’s a job, certainly, but not exclusively. There’s a transparency to it, an occupation stripped of the usual ambitions. One doesn’t move up or down. One waits. You are a waiter.

It is fast money—loose, slippery bills that inflate and disappear over the course of an evening. It can be a means, to those with concrete ends and unwavering vision. I grasped most of that easily enough when I was hired at the restaurant at twenty-two.

Some of it was a draw: the money, the sense of safety that came from having a place to wait. What I didn’t see was that the time had severe brackets around it. Within those brackets nothing else existed. Outside of them, all you could remember was the blur of a momentary madness. Ninety percent of us wouldn’t even put it on a résumé. We might mention it as a tossed-off reference to our moral rigor, a badge of a certain kind of misery, like enduring earthquakes, or spending time in the army. It was so finite.

I came here in a car like everybody else. In a car filled with shit I thought meant something and shortly thereafter tossed on the street: DVDs, soon to be irrelevant, a box of digital and film cameras for a still-latent photography talent, a copy of On the Road that I couldn’t finish, and a Swedish-modern lamp from Walmart. It was a long, dark drive from a place so small you couldn’t find it on a generous map.

Does anyone come to New York clean? I’m afraid not. But crossing the Hudson I thought of crossing Lethe, milky river of forgetting. I forgot that I had a mother who drove away before I could open my eyes, and a father who moved invisibly through the rooms of our house. I forgot the parade of people in my life as thin as mesh screens, who couldn’t catch whatever it was I wanted to say to them, and I forgot how I drove down dirt roads between desiccated fields, under an oppressive guard of stars, and felt nothing.

Yes, I’d come to escape, but from what? The twin pillars of football and church? The low, faded homes on childless cul-de-sacs? Mornings of the Gazette and boxed doughnuts? The sedated, sentimental middle of it? It didn’t matter. I would never know exactly, for my life, like most, moved only imperceptibly and definitively forward.

Let’s say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at seven a.m. with the sun circulating and dawning, the sky full of sharp corners of light, before the exhaust rose, before the heat gridlocked in, windows unrolled, radio turned up to some impossibly hopeful pop song, open, open, open.

SOUR: all the puckering citrus juices, the thin-skinned Meyer lemons, knobbed Kaffirs. Astringent yogurts and vinegars. Lemons resting in pint containers at all the cooks’ sides. Chef yelled, This needs acid!, and they eviscerated lemons, leaving the caressing sting of food that’s alive.

I didn’t know about the tollbooths.

“I didn’t know,” I said to the tollbooth lady. “Can’t I squeeze through this one time?”

The woman in the booth was as unmoved as an obelisk. The driver in the car behind me started honking, and then the driver behind him, until I wanted to duck under the steering wheel. She directed me to the side where I reversed, turned, and found myself facing the direction from which I had just come.

I pulled off into a maze of industrial streets, each one more misleading than the next. It was irrational but I was terrified of not being able to find an ATM and having to go all the way back. I pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts. I took out twenty dollars and looked at my remaining balance: $146.00. I used the restroom and rinsed off my face. Almost, I said to my strained face in the mirror.

“Can I get a large iced hazelnut coffee?” I asked. The man wheezing behind the counter masticated me with his eyes.

“You’re back?” He handed me the change.

“Excuse me?”

“You were in here yesterday. You got that same coffee.”

“No. I. Did. Not.” I shook my head for emphasis. I imagined myself getting out of the car yesterday, tomorrow, and every day of my new life, pulling into the Dunkin’ Donuts in motherfucking New Jersey, and ordering that coffee. I felt sick. “I didn’t,” I said again, still shaking my head.

“I’m back, it’s me,” I said to the tollbooth woman, rolling the window down triumphantly. She raised one eyebrow and hooked her thumb into her belt loop. I handed her money like it was nothing. “Can I get in now?”

SALT: your mouth waters itself. Flakes from Brittany, liquescent on contact. Blocks of pink salt from the Himalayas, matte gray clumps from Japan. An endless stream of kosher salt, falling from Chef’s hand. Salting the most nuanced of enterprises, the food always requesting more, but the tipping point fatal.

A friend of a friend of a friend, his name was Jesse. A spare bedroom for $700 a month. A neighborhood called Williamsburg. The city was in the grips of a tyrannical heat wave, the daily papers headlined with news of people dying in Queens and the outer boroughs where there were blackouts. The cops were passing out bags of ice, an evaporating consolation.

The streets were wide and vacant and I parked my car on Roebling. It was midafternoon, there wasn’t enough shade, and every business seemed closed. I walked over to Bedford Avenue to look for signs of life. I saw a coffee shop and thought about asking if they needed a barista. When I looked through the window the kids on laptops were thin lipped, pierced, gaunt, so much older than me. I had promised myself to find work swiftly and unthinkingly—as a waitress, a barista, a whatever-the-fuck-job so I could feel planted. But when I told myself to open the door my hand objected.

The waterfront skyline was plastered with skeletons of high-rises, escalating out of the low buildings. They looked like mistakes that had been rubbed out with an eraser. Creaking above an overgrown, abandoned lot was a rusted-out Mobil gas sign—all around me ambivalent evidence of extinction.

This new roommate had left the keys at a bar near the apartment. He worked in an office in Midtown during the day and couldn’t meet me.

Clem’s was a dark spot on a bright corner, the air conditioner rumbling like a diesel motor. It anointed me with a drip when I walked in, and I stood blinking in the airstream while my eyes adjusted.

There was a bartender leaning heavily against the back counter with his boots up on the bar in front of him. He wore a patched and studded denim vest with no shirt underneath. Two women sat in front of him in yellow print dresses, twirling straws in big drinks. No one said anything to me.

“Keys, keys, keys,” he said when I asked. In addition to his body odor, which hit me in the face on my approach, this man was covered in terrifying—demonic—tattoos. The skin of his ribs seemed glued on. A mustache as defined as pigtails. He pulled out the register, threw it on the bar, and rummaged through the drawer underneath. Stacks of credit cards, foreign change, envelopes, receipts. The bills fluttered against the clamps.

“You Jesse’s girl?”

“Ha,” one of the women said from down the bar. She pressed her drink onto her forehead and rolled it back and forth. “That was funny.”

“It’s South Second and Roebling,” I said.

“Am I a fucking real estate agent?” He threw a handful of keys with plastic colored tags at me.

“Aw, don’t scare her,” the second woman said. They didn’t look like sisters exactly, but they were both fleshy, rising out of their halter necklines like figureheads on the prow of a ship. One was blond, the other brunette—and now that I was looking, their dresses were definitely identical. They murmured inside jokes to each other.

How am I going to live here? I wondered. Someone is going to have to change, them or me. I found the keys marked 220 Roebling. The bartender ducked down.

“Thank you very much, sir,” I said to the air.

“Oh, no problem, madame,” he said, popping up and batting his eyes at me. He opened a can of beer, pushed his mustache up, and ran his tongue around it while looking at me.

“Okay,” I said, backing away. “Well, maybe I’ll come in again. For like . . . a drink.”

“I’ll be here with bells on,” he said, turning his back on me. His stench lingered.

Just before I stepped out into the heat I heard one of the women say, “Oh god,” and then from that bartender: “There goes the fucking neighborhood.”

SWEET: granular, powdered, brown, slow like honey or molasses. The mouth-coating sugars in milk. Once, when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us, the first narcotic we craved and languished in. We’ve tamed, refined it, but the juice from a peach still runs like a flash flood.

I don’t remember why I went to that restaurant first.

I do remember—in perfect detail—that stretch of Sixteenth Street that gave away so little: the impersonal, midcentury teal of Coffee Shop, the battalion of dumpsters between us and Blue Water Grill, the bodega with two small card tables where they let you drink beer. Always uniformed servers buying Altoids and energy drinks.

The alley where the cooks lined up to smoke cigarettes between services, the recesses of the alley where they smoked pot and kicked at the rats tearing through the trash. And just beyond our line of vision we could sense the outlines of the scrawny park.

What did the Owner gaze at when he built it? The future.

When I got there they told me a lot of stories. Nobody went to Union Square in the eighties, they said. Only a few of the publishing houses had moved down there. That city has been replaced by another city. The Whole Foods, the Barnes & Noble, the Best Buy—they got stacked right on top of it. In Rome, they dig for a subway and find whole civilizations. With all the artists, the politicians, the tailors, the hairdressers, the bartenders. If you dug right here on Sixteenth Street you’d find us, younger, and all the stale haunts, and all the old bums in the park younger too.

What did those original servers see when they went to the first interviews in 1985? A tavern, a grill, a bistro? A mess of Italy, France, and some burgeoning American cuisine that nobody really believed in yet? A hodgepodge that shouldn’t have worked? When I asked them what they saw, they said he’d built a kind of restaurant that hadn’t been there before. They all said that when they walked in, it felt like coming home.

BITTER: always a bit unanticipated. Coffee, chocolate, rosemary, citrus rinds, wine. Once, when we were wild, it told us about poison. The mouth still hesitates at each new encounter. We urge it forward, say, Adapt. Now, enjoy it.

I smiled too much. At the end of the interview the corners of my mouth ached like stakes in a tent. I wore a black sundress and a pilled cardigan, which was the most conservative and professional thing I owned. I had a handful of résumés folded up in my purse, and my loose plan—if that’s even the right word for the hesitant brand of instinct I forced myself to follow with a sense of doom—was to walk into restaurants until I got hired. When I asked my roommate where I should look for a job, he said the best restaurant in New York City was in Union Square. Within a minute of getting off the train I developed giant wet half-moons of sweat in the cardigan, but the top of my dress was too revealing to remove it.

“Why did you choose New York?” asked Howard, the general manager.

“I thought you were going to ask me why I chose this restaurant,” I said.

“Let’s start with New York.”

I knew from books, movies, and Sex and the City how I was supposed to answer. I’ve always dreamed of living here, they say. They stress the word dreamed, lengthen it, to make it sound true.

I knew so many said: I came here to be a singer/dancer/actress/photographer/painter. In finance/fashion/publishing. I came here to be powerful/beautiful/wealthy. This always seemed to mean: I’m stopping here to become someone else.

I said, “It really didn’t feel like a choice. Where else is there to go?”

“Ah,” he said. “It’s a bit of a calling isn’t it?”

That’s all. Ah. And I felt like he understood that I didn’t have endless options, that there was only one place large enough to hold so much unbridled, unfocused desire. Ah. Maybe he knew how I fantasized about living a twenty-four-hour life. Maybe he knew how bored I had been up until now.

Howard was in his late forties with a cultivated, square face. His hair receded finely, emphasizing bulging eyes that told me he didn’t need much sleep. He stood squarely on athletic legs, balancing a prominent belly. Judicious eyes, I thought, as he tapped his fingers on the white tablecloth and assessed me.

“You have nice nails,” I said, looking at his hands.

“It’s part of the job,” he said, unswayed. “Tell me what you know about wine.”

“Oh, the basics. I’m competent in the basics.” As in I knew the difference between white and red wine and it couldn’t get more basic than that.

“For example,” he said, looking around the room as if plucking a question from the air, “what are the five noble grapes of Bordeaux?”

I pictured cartoon grapes wearing crowns on their heads, welcoming me to their châteaux—Hello, we are the noble grapes of Bordeaux, they said. I debated lying. It was impossible to know how much honesty about my ignorance would be valued.

“Mer . . . lot?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s one.”

“Cabernet? I’m sorry, I don’t really drink Bordeaux.”

He seemed sympathetic. “Of course, it’s a bit above the average price point.”

“Yep.” I nodded. “That’s totally it.”

“What do you drink?”

My first instinct was to list the different beverages I drank on a daily basis. The noble grapes were back in my head, dancing, telling him all about my Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee.

“What do I drink when?”

“When you purchase a bottle of wine, what do you tend toward?”

I imagined myself purchasing a bottle of wine, not based on price or proximity to the checkout line, not based on what animal was on the label, but by an internal matrix of my own taste. That image was as laughable as my noble grapes, even if I was wearing a cardigan.

“Beaujolais? Is that a wine?”

“It is. Beaujolais, c’est un vin fainéant et radin.”

“Yes. That.”

“Which cru do you prefer?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, batting my eyelashes forcibly, falsely.

“Do you have any experience as a server?”

“Yes. I’ve been working at that coffee shop for years. It’s on my résumé.”

“I mean in a restaurant. Do you know what it means to be a server?”

“Yes. When the plates are ready I bring them out and serve them to customers.”

“You mean guests.”

“Guests?”

“Your guests.”

“Yes, that’s what I meant.” He scribbled on the top of my résumé. Server? Guests? What was the difference between a guest and a customer?

“It says here you were an English major.”

“Yes. I know. It’s generic.”

“What are you reading?”

“Reading?”

“What are you reading right now?”

“Is that a job question?”

“Perhaps.” He smiled. His eyes made an unabashed, slow circle around my face.

“Um. Nothing. For the first time in my life, I’m reading nothing.” I paused and looked out the window. I don’t think anyone, even my professors, had once asked me what I was reading. He was digging, and though I had no idea what he was looking for, I decided it was better to play. “You know, Howard, if I can call you that, when I was leaving for here I packed a few boxes of books. But then I really started looking at them. These books were . . . I don’t know . . . totems of who I was. . . . I . . .”

My words had a point, I had just felt the point coming, I was trying to tell him the truth. “I left them behind. That’s what I mean.”

He rested his cheek on an aristocratic hand. He listened. No, he perceived. I felt perceived. “Yes. It’s startling to look back on the passionate epiphanies of our youth. But a good sign perhaps. That our minds have changed, that we’ve evolved.”

“Or maybe it means we’ve forgotten ourselves. And we keep forgetting ourselves. And that’s the big grown-up secret to survival.”

I stared out the window. The city passed on, obliviously. If this went badly I would forget it too.

“Are you a writer?”

“No,” I said. The table came back into focus. He was looking at me. “I like books. And everything else.”

“You like everything else?”

“You know what I mean, I like it all. I like being moved.”

He made another note on my résumé.

“What do you dislike?”

“What?” I thought I’d misheard him.

“If you like being moved, what do you dislike?”

“Are these normal questions?”

“This isn’t a normal restaurant.” He smiled and crossed his hands.

“Okay.” I looked back out the window. Enough. “I don’t like that question.”

“Why?”

My palms were damp. That was the moment I realized I wanted the job. That job, at that restaurant specifically. I looked at my hands and said, “It feels a little personal.”

“All right.” He didn’t skip a beat, a quick glance at my résumé and he was on track. “Can you tell me about a problem at one of your last jobs? At that coffee shop, I suppose. Tell me about a problem there and how you solved it.”

As if I had dreamed it, the interior of the coffee shop dissolved when I tried to recall it directly. And when I tried to remember punching in there, tried to remember the sink, the register, the coffee grinds, the objects faded. And then her fat, gloating, vindictive face appeared.

“There was this awful woman, Mrs. Pound. I mean it, she was insufferable. We called her The Hammer. From the second she walked in everything was wrong, the coffee scalded her or it tasted like dirt, the music was too loud, or her blueberry muffin had poisoned her the night before. She was always threatening to shut us down, telling us to get our lawyer ready each time she bumped into a table. She wanted scrambled eggs for her dog. Never tipped us a cent. She was dreaded. But then, this was a little over a year ago, she had her foot amputated. She was diabetic. None of us ever knew, I mean, why would we know? And she would wheel by in her wheelchair and everyone was like, Finally, The Hammer is done.”

“Finally, what?” Howard asked.

“Oh, I forgot that part. We didn’t have a ramp. And there were stairs. So she was finished, more or less.”

“More or less,” he said.

“But, the real part of the story. We met eyes one day when she was wheeling by, and she was glaring, I mean, hateful. And I don’t know why, but I missed her. I missed her face. So I made her coffee and I ran after her. I wheeled her across the street to the park and she complained about everything from the weather to indigestion. From then on it was our thing. Every day. I even brought the scrambled eggs in a to-go container for her dog. My coworkers made so much fun of me.”

The Hammer’s swollen, varicosed legs. Flashing her stump at me from under her housedress. Her purple fingers.

“Does that answer your question? The problem was not having a ramp, I guess. The solution was to bring out the coffee. I’m sorry, I didn’t explain it very well.”

“I think you explained it perfectly. That was a kind thing to do.”

I shrugged. “I really liked her actually.”

The Hammer was the only impolite person I knew. She put me in that restaurant. I felt it then but didn’t understand it. It was her niece’s daughter who was a friend of a friend of my new roommate in Williamsburg. Our goodbye had been tearful—on my end, not hers. I promised to write her letters, but the weeks were eclipsing our small relationship. And as I looked at Howard and the perfectly set table and the tasteful hydrangea arrangement between us, I understood what he meant by guest, and I also knew that I would never see her again.

“Did you move here with anyone? Girlfriends? A boyfriend?”

“No.”

“That’s very brave.”

“Is it? It’s been two days and I feel pretty foolish.”

“It’s brave if you make it, foolish if you fail.”

I wanted to ask him how I would be able to tell the difference and when.

“If you’re hired here, what do you want the next year to bring you?”

I forgot that I was being interviewed. I forgot about my negative bank account, my pit stains, and the noble grapes. I said something about wanting to learn. About my work ethic.

I was never good at the future. I grew up with girls whose chief occupation was the future—designing it, instigating it. They could talk about it with so much confidence that it sounded like the past. During those talks, I had contributed nothing.

I had visions, too abstract and flat for me to hang on to. For years I saw a generic city lit up at night. I would use those remote, artificial lights to soothe myself to sleep. One day I was quitting my job with no sense of exhilaration, one day I was leaving a note for my father, pulling out of his driveway, slightly bewildered, and two days later I was sitting in front of Howard. That was the way the future came to me.

The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn’t look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street whose names she couldn’t call to mind. She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.

As I thanked him and we reviewed my contact information, I didn’t know what had transpired, whether it was good or bad. It took me a moment to even remember the name of the restaurant. He held my hand too long and as I stood, his eyes traveled down my body, not like an employer’s, but like a man’s.

“I dislike mopping. And lying,” I said. I don’t know why. “Those are the two that come to mind.”

He nodded and smiled—what I wanted to call a private smile. The backs of my legs were damp with sweat and as I walked away I felt his eyes unabashedly on my ass. At the door, I rolled my cardigan off my shoulders, and arched as if stretching. No one knows how I got the job, but it’s better to be honest about these things.

TASTE, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the salty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.

Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Let the Cover Deceive You: This Book is Not "Brain Candy"

S.B. · June 10, 2016

I’d been hearing incredible things about this debut novel from bloggers I trust and, with my love of food and interest in the NYC food scene, I was fairly confident I would love it too. And, I did. It’s only my fourth 5 star book of the year! This is one of those books where the cover and premise could deceive you into thinking you’re getting “brain candy”. What you’re actually getting is a smart, exquisitely written coming of age story set in the rough and tumble world of top-notch restaurants. The story of a young girl searching for her place in the world.For me, the success of Sweetbitter is entirely due to Danler’s storytelling style and writing. It’s all about the way she writes about…well, anything.She writes about food: she doesn’t just describe flavors, rather she talks about a food’s meaning and purpose."At that point I couldn’t remember the orchards, the blossoms, the life of the apple outside the city. I only knew that it was a humble fruit, made for unremarkable moments. It’s just food, I thought as I finished it, core and all. And yet it carries us into winter. It holds us steady."She writes about the act of eating."Once you admit you want things to taste like more or better versions of themselves – once you commit to flavor as your god – the rest follows. I started adding salt to everything. My tongue grew calloused, overworked. You want the fish to taste like fish, but fish times a thousand. Times a million. Fish on crack. I was lucky I never tried crack."She writes about working in the restaurant business."What I didn’t see was that the time had severe brackets around it. Within those brackets nothing else existed. Outside of them, all you could remember was the blur of a momentary madness. Ninety percent of us wouldn’t even put it on a resume. We might mention it as a tossed-off reference to our moral rigor, a badge of a certain kind of misery, like enduring earthquakes, or spending time in the army."She writes about wine (and makes it interesting even to someone who doesn’t care at all about the intricacies of wine)."Terroir. I looked it up in The World Atlas of Wine in the manager’s office. The definition was people talking around it without identifying it. It seemed a bit far-fetched. That food had character, composed of the soil, the climate, the time of year. That you could taste that character. But still. An idea mystical enough to be seductive."She writes about 9/11, giving me goosebumps and a lump in my throat."I was pouring milk into my cereal, I looked down for one second…I was asleep, I didn’t even feel the impact.A tide of people moving up the avenues on foot.Blackness.Sometimes it feels too soon.It’s our shared map of the city.Then the sirens, for days.We never forget, really.A map we make by absences.No one left the city. If you were here, you were temporarily cured of fear."She writes about dating/love in a way that didn’t make me want to vomit from the cheesiness. There is romance in this book, but not the traditional kind…more of the painful, unhealthy kind reminiscent of Tender."His certainty always disabled my thoughts, like in this moment when I searched for my words, for my anger, and found a void where my reason had been."She writes about living in NYC."Remember this, I told myself. Remember how quiet today is. I had the newspaper, which I would keep for years, and I was on my way to lunch in Chinatown by myself. As I contemplated the skyline this double feeling came to me as one thought, pressing in from either side of the bridge, impossible for me to reconcile: It is ludicrous for anyone to live here and I can never leave."Grab this book immediately if you’re in the market for a somewhat lighter read that’s smart and well-done, but especially if you’re a foodie, spent some of your young adult life in NYC, and/or work or have worked in a restaurant.For more reviews, check out my blog (Sarah's Book Shelves).

4.0 out of 5 stars Raw, sexy, thrilling dive into service life inside Union Square Restaurant

M. · August 28, 2016

“Appetite is not a symptom,.. It’s a state of being, and like most, has its attendant moral consequences.”Sexy, racy, indulgent, shallow.. .an enlightening dive into life within a restaurant. It felt authentic and raw, a full sensory & gustatory experience.. for which reason, I recommend this book be read accompanied by a glass of wine. With all the drinking, drugging, and embarrassing mistakes made by the protagonist, you will need it. She bares her soul and the soul of the restaurant industry. I have not had the pleasure of working in a restaurant, but have had friends who have and this novel definitely sheds light on the subject.“Sweetbitter” was written by Stephanie Danler drawing on her own experience as a backwaiter in NYC. The protagonist in the novel, whose name you do not learn until half-way through is Tess. She presents herself as naive, unpretentious, inexperienced and unworldly, but is out to prove herself to survive and achieve in the restaurant which is modeled after Union Square. She comes under the wing of Simone, who is older, experienced, worldly and uncomfortably close to the bartender that Tess is fixated on. Tess learns about terroir, and develops an appreciation of food and wine. She gets swept up in the late night partying, which is part and parcel of working in the restaurant. She becomes involved in a love triangle. She makes ridiculous choices. She is a character you root for, though. Through her, you gain insight into the secret life of a restaurant, how it becomes all-encompassing, lending itself to late nights with drugs and alcohol, to relationships that lack depth, and self harm.I felt transported to the time after college where there is so much to learn, to experience, where anything can happen, where so many relationships are fleeting. I cannot imagine being Tess, alone and new to a city without any friends or family nearby, not returning home for the holidays. My heart ached for her loneliness, her desperate yearning to fit in, her poor choices. However, I also felt the energy and excitement of this time in life, the possibilities, the opportunities, the relationships.I loved the book for the most part. It’s an exciting and fun read. I recommend it to anyone interested in the restaurant industry, who enjoys reading about food and wine, who’s looking for a spicy book to read.For my wine and spirit notes from this novel, please see book-chatter.com

Not a.page-turner for me

D. · July 22, 2016

It's a cute read for any longtime fan of the Union Square Cafe, such as myself. But the obsessive desire of a pretty girl for a nwar-autistic barman didn't pass muster with me. Not a page-turner if one doesn't give a family.

unterhaltsam, girlish, weise

g. · January 11, 2017

Wer zeitgenössische, lebenskluge chicklit mag, die im neoliberalen New Yorke der twenty- bis thyrtiesomethings angesiedelt ist, wird dieses Buch lieben. Coming of age aus Sicht einer weiblichen Protagonistin wurde so aktuell, schön und schmerzhaft realistisch seit der Jahrtausendwende wohl nicht geschrieben. Literatur für junge Kosmopoliten und Brooklyn-Liebhaber, auch, und vielleicht besonders, für männliche Leser (es werden Geheimnisse ausgeplaudert).

One of the best books of the year so far

J. · August 22, 2016

This book stands out in a sea of what have so far this year been 'average' titles. Cleverly written, it draws you in and what happens matters. One of those books that you can't put down or if you have to then you're marking time until you can pick it up again. Apparently the reviewer from the New York Times found it so gripping that he missed his plane - despite having already checked in and sitting at the gate!

Go for it if you must

U.M. · May 25, 2018

It was completely a restraunt setting. A bit fast and in between I was losing track of whats being said and about whom. Go for it if you must.

Five Stars

L. · June 18, 2018

Thank you!!!

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Sweetbitter (Vintage Contemporaries)

Name: Sweetbitter (Vintage Contemporaries)
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SKU: U1101911867
Price: 87.9 AED
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Rating: 3.7 (7 reviews)

Product ID: U1101911867

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3.7

^AED87⁹⁰

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Visit the Vintage Store

Sweetbitter (Vintage Contemporaries)

Product ID: U1101911867

Condition: New

3.7

Type: Paperback

^AED87⁹⁰

Price includes VAT & Import Duties

Availability: In Stock

Quantity:

Order today to get by 7-14 business days

Delivery fee of AED 20. Free for orders above AED 200.

Returns & Warranty policies

Imported From: United States

At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.

Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.

Unless otherwise stated, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.

All items are shipped by air, and any products classified as “Dangerous Goods (DG)” under IATA regulations will be removed from the order and cancelled.

Description:

Review

About the Author

STEPHANIE DANLER is a writer based in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Let the Cover Deceive You: This Book is Not "Brain Candy"

S.B. · June 10, 2016

4.0 out of 5 stars Raw, sexy, thrilling dive into service life inside Union Square Restaurant

M. · August 28, 2016

Not a.page-turner for me

D. · July 22, 2016

unterhaltsam, girlish, weise

g. · January 11, 2017

One of the best books of the year so far

J. · August 22, 2016

Go for it if you must

U.M. · May 25, 2018

It was completely a restraunt setting. A bit fast and in between I was losing track of whats being said and about whom. Go for it if you must.

Five Stars

L. · June 18, 2018

Thank you!!!

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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Sweetbitter (Vintage Contemporaries)

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Sweetbitter (Vintage Contemporaries)

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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Description:

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About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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Sweetbitter (Vintage Contemporaries)

Shipping Policies

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Product Disclaimer

Description:

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About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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