In ‘Cellar Rat,’ A Sommelier’s ‘Righteous Indignation’ About the Restaurant Industry

Hannah Selinger’s new memoir reflects on her years spent working at restaurants like Momofuku and Jean-Georges

In 2020, the writer and former sommelier Hannah Selinger wrote a review for Eater of Dave Chang’s memoir, Eat a Peach. In it, Selinger reflects on her brief time as the beverage director of the fledgling Momofuku in 2008 — a position in which she experienced, as she wrote, “the roiling, red-faced, screaming, pulsing, wrath-filled man that was David Chang.” To Selinger, Chang’s memoir, even with its sense of guilt and regret, still failed to grapple with the “trauma left in his wake.”

“As I was working through that piece, I realized that, in opening that door to that one experience, I had a lot of other things that were bothering me,” says Selinger, who worked her way up from being a server in hometown pub in Massachusetts to the highest echelons of New York City fine dining at Jean-Georges. Her experiences at Momofuku and beyond formed the basis of her new memoir, Cellar Rat, out today from Little Brown.

Drawing on industry memoirs like Service Included over chef memoirs, Selinger offers a time capsule of the early 2000s NYC restaurant scene and its major figures through a service worker’s point of view. Some anecdotes aren’t flattering to Selinger: At one point she’s fired from a restaurant after passing off cheap gin for a more expensive gin while running the restaurant’s beverage program. As she continues with her career, Selinger’s bad experiences in the industry extend to “outright and internalized misogyny” at the hands of Chang and Christina Tosi (the latter of whom Selinger accuses of manipulative behavior), and a traumatic encounter with the pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini, who has faced accusations of sexual harassment.

Cellar Rat traces Selinger’s decade in the industry, from falling in love with restaurants — despite being from New England, her crash course in seafood didn’t come until she worked for Bobby Flay — to becoming disillusioned by them and leaving. It’s full of timely, sharp criticism as well as the gossipy, tell-all quality that draws so many people to restaurant memoirs. Ultimately, Selinger wonders what is at fault for her bad experiences: her own choices or the industry itself. Either way, she is happier to have left. “I’m not so sure that I would have been long for the industry, even if I had tried to stay,” Selinger says. “I don’t know how wanted I was in the industry.”

Eater talked to Selinger about her criticisms of the restaurant industry and how her time in high-end restaurants shaped how she interacts with dining today.

You write about restaurant work as requiring that you “make yourself incredibly small.” How has leaving the industry and becoming a writer changed your ability to take up space in it?

I think people value my opinion in a way that they didn’t value it before, which is refreshing. But, you know, there’s always opposition to that too. I think one thing you really are denied in restaurants is a voice, because you’re part of a system and that system is to deliver hospitality, which is something I find valuable.

But when you’re part of the system, you are one of many people and that quieted so much of what I had to say. Now, I’m able to kind of look back and think, okay, these are all the things that I would have said had I the opportunity.

In your review of Chang’s memoir, you write a lot about how Chang portrays his anger. You write that the memoir “wants to reframe Chang’s self-righteous anger... and to sell it back to the public as his pardon.” There’s a throughline of anger in Cellar Rat, though a different kind of anger. How did you think about anger while writing and the purpose you wanted it to serve in your book?

My anger was and continues to be internal anger. I wish I could say that I’ve completely shed my internal anger, but I’m still angry at a lot of things. Women are often denied permission to be angry, both internally and externally. There are a lot of names that are used for people like me — petty, aggrieved, settling scores, a bitch, just to round up a few — when we express what I find to be righteous indignation at things that have happened to us due to the way structures are laid out in any industry. I’m using restaurants as one of them because it’s the one I know best.

The anger that I express in Cellar Rat is really about watching all of these things happen and experiencing them and also not really knowing if I’m responsible for them. That’s something that I still sort of continue to work through: What part did I have in all of this? I was not raped, but certainly there was an assault. I think most people who are victims of something like that do ask themselves at some point: Was this my fault? Did I have a hand in this? Did I do the wrong thing? Did I drink too much? Did I go home to the wrong place?

That also breeds another kind of anger. It’s anger that’s directed at yourself, and that’s a very different situation from what Chang did, which was externally propelling his anger at staff. Those were feelings that I feel were really unresolved after all of my time working in restaurants that needed to be explored in the format of a book.

Especially now that we’re post-2020, which had that summer of reckonings, and post-The Bear, through which a lot more people know about the toxicity in the industry, what do you see as the role of the restaurant memoir today?

I remain optimistic that all the stories I put out there are not digested for shock value, but that they’re digested for aspiration and change: that people continue to see these stories over and over again, so that they say, okay, we really do need to do something about these systemic problems in the industry, which have not yet been resolved.

I think my position in putting this work out there is the same position that I had five years ago, which is that I want you to see it, I want you to change it. Is the world any more prepared for that than they were five years ago? I leave that up to everybody else to assess, but I’m hopeful that the more we keep talking about it, the more we can change it.

I saw you once describe this book as a story about “being hated” and I’m wondering if you can expand on what you mean by that.

One thing I like to make clear when I’m talking about this book, and memoir in general, is that all of these experiences are, of course, my experiences, but they also speak to broader experiences. I think when I say I was hated, I also mean that other people like me were hated, or women were hated. I think that there was a strong distaste [in the industry] for women who had opinions.

I have always been the kind of person who had trouble keeping my mouth shut and [the restaurant industry] was not the kind of place where saying anything or speaking one’s mind was embraced. A thread of misogyny ran very strong through the restaurant industry, and continues to run strong through the restaurant industry, and it pinned me down.

How have your experiences falling out of love with fine dining influenced how you experience restaurants today?

I experience fine dining less and less for a number of reasons. One of them, purely practical, is that I have young kids, and I dine mostly with my children. But also, I have experienced a true disillusionment with that kind of dining. Whereas I once picked up and flew to Spain because I got a reservation at El Bulli and I was able to sit through a seven-hour meal, I don’t really have the constitution for that anymore. I feel a little bit like the mask has been pulled off.

I love restaurants and I still love the magic of a dining room and the right meal at the right time, but I think I’m probably never going to feel comfortable in the kind of dining room where the silverware is turned over and the bottles are approaching two grand. That was a chapter of my life that I think is closed.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Additional photo illustration credits: Hannah Selinger portrait by Meghan Ireland