I was so looking forward to reading this one (I always enjoy a memoir about food/the restaurant industry!), but unfortunately it wasn’t quite for me. Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the ARC!

Cellar Rat by Hannah Selinger - this was good, but I have been reading a lot of food/restaraunt memoirs lately and this wasn't my favorite of the bunch.

3.5 stars. Hannah Seling graduate from Columbia University with the goal of becoming a writer, but instead spent the next decade working in some of New York City’s buzziest restaurants as a server then a sommelier. This book is gossipy and drops a lot of names in the restaurant business. It also talks of the trauma and unpredictability of a life working in restaurants. I enjoyed this book, but it also felts somewhat ill-timed as the trauma of the world seems a lot bigger than upper class restaurants in the uber expensive city. This is well written, though, and those that follow the restaurant world will find it interesting. I received a complimentary digital copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

I really enjoyed reading this, Hannah Selinger was able to tell their story in a way that was engaging and worked with the overall feel of this. I appreciated getting to read the rise and fall in this and enjoyed the sneak peak of the restaurant industry. Hannah Selinger wrote this well and am excited for more.

"Cellar Rat" was a DNF for me at 64% of the way through. This highly personal story follows the author's career, starting right out of college. She fell into working in the restaurant industry and eventually became involved with wine, mostly because it allowed her to remain in restaurants, but in a more prestigious position.

She shares the seedier and toxic aspects of restaurant work and focuses a lot on the dysfunction. As someone who has spent ten years in the wine industry myself, I had hoped to hear more about an appreciation for food and wines, and while she does touch on it periodically, it focuses a lot more on the toxicity of the industry, the bed hopping, and the excessive behaviours.

At more than midway through the book, it seems like the rest of the story will just be more of the same, so I decided to move on to something else.

Thanks anyway to Hannah Selinger, Little, Brown and Company, and NetGalley for an advance review copy.

Hannah Selinger has graduated college and wants to be a writer, but first she spends several years in restaurants as a server and then sommelier in a series of NYC restaurants. This is her story -- her experiences in restaurants from casual to "fine dining" until she finally begins her career as a writer for a variety of food magazines.

While this is an informative book, I think it would appeal most to those who live in NYC or are enamored of the City. Since I am neither, I found much of the book a bit tedious -- there's just too many references to restaurants, clubs, and general life in NYC. Selinger name drops a multitude of celebrities, many of whom I was unfamiliar with. This is a highly personal book. There are pages of introspective musings that, frankly, I found overdone and unnecessary. There are definitely moments of intriguing tales of how restaurant life works -- conflicts with overbearing chefs, intrigue over missing liquor, stories about celebrities who tip poorly, etc. On the whole, I found myself skimming much of the book. I'm likely not the target demographic (I'm not young, hip, or a City dweller), so this was just "meh" for me, but I'm sure others will find it fascinating.

This was an interesting book about Hannah who went to school at Columbia and decided to work in the restaurant business. Every chapter had a different theme. What happened to her? And these different restaurants she worked and she also provided recipes at the end of the chapters. I worked in the business my whole entire life. And I can really relate to what she was saying. She had A.
Lot of confidence because she got jobs but she is actually learning how to be in the restaurant world. It is a very tough world to work and especially for women. And I don't know how she pulled it off in New York because that's the hardest place to pull it off. People just don't understand the restaurant business. It's very hard. It's very competitive, very stressful. And a lot of drugs and alcohol goes on as well. Why I lived in Boston? I was part of that world. We had our local bars. We'd go after work and drink. She tells it like it really is.

This was a DNF at about the halfway mark, where I finally decided I was bored of hearing about restaurant work.
Thanks to #netgalley and #littlebrownandcompany for this #arc of #cellarrat in exchange for an honest review.

I love when a curtain is pulled back, exposing industries, giving a real-life account of how things truly are. Hannah Selinger very much wrote 'Cellar Rat' as her own experience, and she doesn't pull any punches with name dropping bad experiences and shady and abusive people. However, it does not read as a '"tell all" of the restaurant industry but rather the habits and patterns Selinger experienced in the 2000s/2010s. I would have appreciated more introspection and/or bringing in other voices. As it is now, it reads much like a well-written personal journal that I enjoyed but doubt will shake anything up.

3.75/5, big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC

Can you like a book but not the author?
I did enjoy the behind the scenes and the time in the wine cellar- the food, the service and even the politics and celebrity were worth the read. But the reflections of relationships a decade or more later made me wonder if the author was mining for material based on historical trends.

But I love the cover!

If you’ve ever wanted the tea on problematic celebrity NY chefs (David Chang, Johnny Iuzzini, Christina Tosi, to name a few), this is it.

While I thought it would explore more about the author’s journey to becoming a wine connoisseur, I was entertained reading about the gossip, some I knew, some I didn’t.

There were anecdotes and details repeated several times (I don’t know if maybe the book had begun as individual essays), which became a little distracting, but I was satisfied overall.

In a time where The Bear and other cooking shows are becoming more and more popular, CELLAR RAT feels like a gritty, greasy, breath of fresh air, telling the tales of Hannah's time in the restaurant industry.

It was really fun reading stories of the different parties that Hannah was a part of, from the food, to the gossip, and everything in-between.

Hannah Selinger's writing feels like a conversation with a friend- it's light, easy to read, yet full of details that feel honest and raw. There were times where I wondered if I should really be reading what I was reading, but it was entertaining the entire time.

This memoir peels back the glossy veneer of fine dining to expose the underbelly rich in misogyny, exploitation, and ego-driven hierarchies. At times I think the author overlooked her privilege and some of the stories just came off as vindictive and bitter, particularly toward the personnel associated with David Chang and Momofuku. But I would likely feel the same way after being subjected to abusive working environments.

Sincere thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

I am so thankful I graduated with an accounting degree and worked as a boring accountant for thirty years, as I would have never made it in the restaurant business. I didn’t realize how hard they all work just to provide a meal to customers. I loved the raw details and vulnerability she shared. And it was so engaging and interesting that I couldn’t put it down. Great read!

Since Anthony Bordain's death, fans of Kitchen Confidential type books exploring the behind-the-scenes of the restaurant world have had a void to fill. Hannah Selinger's Cellar Rat details the underworkings of restaurants from the beverage side, working her way up from a waitress at a neighborhood bar to being the sommelier to superstars such as David Chang. Selinger explores the toxicity and misogyny of the industry with shocking yet sadly unsuprising vignettes from her life. She is not afraid to name names, either, and those interested in "how things work" in any kind of job will find much of interest.

I don’t have the words for this. I mean it is extremely important to read about what goes on inside this world but also sometimes you learn something that makes you go … ummm maybe I didn’t need to know this. I liked the book a lot as it reminded me of a Bourdain book in a way.

Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly by Hannah Selinger is an exercise of creative nonfiction, it lets you know with a disclaimer. With the relative freedom of saying something is creative nonfiction versus memoir, I was hoping for something more poetic, more justifiably cruel. Cellar Rat just turns out to be a case of hurt people hurt people. Selinger takes us from the beginning of her career in restaurants, at a place in Massachusetts called The Grog. Here, she gets punched in the face and a DUI driving home from a shift in separate instances. Further in her career, we see her establish herself as a sommelier, beverage director, and server at various New York establishments. Selinger takes to task major players of a certain era of New York fine dining from David Chang to Tim Zagat to pastry chef Christina Tosi. Tosi and Chang certainly seem cruel in their own way, but Selinger never seems to rise above or against them, even with the lens of hindsight. Quite a few other nameless people, or people with singular mentions get discarded with terse one liners or bitter remembrances. I’m all for a bit of salacious haterade but as the meme says: Yes, I’m a hater, but I hate with ethics, nuance, and critical analysis.

I’m all for a mediocre woman character who I don’t LOVE but the entire time reading Cellar Rat I wondered about everyone else at the periphery of Selinger’s life. Especially her father. He is maybe the only real thread to non-restaurant life that Selinger seems to cherish and the writing feels so different when he appears that it becomes a different kind of story. Most interestingly, a kind of story that I actually want to read. Selinger’s experience in the restaurant industry is interesting but not unheard of (unfortunately). Yes, Christina Tosi pointedly decided not to bake her a birthday cake, and yes, that is mean but I don’t think focusing on these petty negative aspects of restaurant culture is really changing anything. It’s certainly not doing the work of actually improving conditions for the mostly people of color working in restaurants. Dizzyingly, each chapter ends with a recipe. To be fair, they are thematically referencing the chapter but they also start to feel like the reward for getting through paragraphs of muck; not unlike a recipe blog. My husband and I chose two of these recipes to cook back to back. The first was delicious. The second was one of the most lackluster meals we’ve ever shared. The bland taste in my mouth after eating the second meal reflects how I feel about Cellar Rat overall.

Interesting and enlightening. Good tidbits of info about celebrities and restaurants in the 90s in NYC. Gritty and honest memoir. Definitely recommend

Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant will tell you that it puts the "fun" in dysfunctional. I really enjoyed this book about working in different restaurants, and the ups and downs, as well as bad behavior by celebrities. I also really loved the recipes included.

Thank you Netgalley and Little, Brown and Company for the ARC!

Readable and interesting to those without experience in the service industry, especially fine dining. However the book did leave the reader wanting a bit: the book seemed to have stuttering pace and lack an overall arc of importance.