Splashy Debut Novel Captures New York City From Inside Its Restaurant Scene



This article originally appears in the May 2016 issue of  ELLE.

Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter (Knopf)—boasting a confident first printing of 100,000 copies—dresses the bones of a classic coming-of-age story with the lusty flesh and blood of a bawdy early twenty-first century picaresque. The novel echoes other splashy debuts (see: Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City) that captured an earlier New York City zeitgeist, and Danler, once a server at Manhattan's Union Square Cafe, quickly draws you into the sparkling surfaces and the shadowy underbelly of the city via one of its most famous restaurants over a span of four appetite-delirious seasons.

Hell-bent on forgetting her difficult Ohio past, 22-year-old Tess, who's naïve but has plenty of attitude, arrives in the sweltering summer of 2006 after "a long dark drive from a place so small you couldn't find it on a generous map." She finds a beat-up apartment share in just gentrifying Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and is hired as a backup waiter at a lionized restaurant that has emerged from and transformed a scruffy 1980s Union Square.

Her insatiable hunger for tactile, sensual satisfaction dares you to tag along.

In short order Tess falls for the sexy twentysomething bartender Jake, who leaves luscious figs in her locker but is somehow mysteriously also in thrall to the restaurant's 37-year-old senior server, Simone. Tess realizes, "Everything was over my head. The senior servers, the bartenders especially, had doctorates in talking shit to guests. They could skim any topic. You couldn't stump them." But she craves the adventure (and misadventure) that comes with fully exploring her senses. Her insatiable hunger for tactile, sensual satisfaction dares you to tag along. The journey is high-minded and dirty, beastly and bountiful.

"Taste is all about balance," the tried-it-all head chef instructs the outwardly professional but inwardly unruly staff. "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."

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