Notes from Underground: A New Memoir Settles Scores in the Restaurant Industry

Hannah Selinger’s ‘Cellar Rat’ is full of fascinating intel on the business of selling wine, plus petty grievances against the hospitality world.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Notes from Underground Settling Scores in the Restaurant Industry by
Howard Chuyyoung read by Ramesh Metani Chassan morache. The pursuit
of good wine often requires the ability to pronounce magic
passwords to gain entrance to enchanted caves, and a lot
of them are in French, which never sounds the way

(00:22):
it looks to English speakers. That was the challenge facing
Hannah Selinger on a first day of somelier training at
a New York City restaurant. The self described arrogant know
it all who always came equipped with categorically correct sets
of facts pronounced every consonant in the name of the
French region famous for its Chardonnay grapes and expensive white burgundies.

(00:45):
Her designated mentor was in stitches, weeping with hilarity. For
the record, it's more like Chassan then an almost imperceptible
nieu morache. For Celinger, however, it was a human that
led to expertise, not just in the locale, but in
the customer pleasing upsell that contributes to the spell wine

(01:08):
casts over fine dining. You like butttery? How about her
know at all instincts helped her accrue knowledge and appreciation.
Given an assignment, she came back to work the next
day ready to astound when she writes about the hedonism
of this intellectual pursuit, It's exciting and almost intoxicating. Sellinger

(01:30):
is the titular creature of a memoir, Cellar Rat, My
Life in the Restaurant Underbelly, Little Brown and Company, March
twenty five. The sobriquet Isn't slanderous its industry slang for
the employee responsible for tracking the inventory in a restaurant's
wine cellar, a role she occupied for a year and
a half before being promoted to sommelier. Selinger literally learned

(01:53):
the trade from the underground up Her books Pens to
Wine were timely for me. I read Cellar Rat a
mid a month's long and continuing spell away from alcohol,
self imposed after an all too celebratory period from November
through the first half of January. The excess left me
feeling sodden and gross. My doctor looked at me and

(02:17):
tisked meantime departing. US Surgeon General Vivague Multi suggested that
wine bottles carry warning labels for risk of cancer, noting
that alcohol is the third most common preventable cause of
the disease after smoking and obesity. All of that helped
set me on the road to temporary sobriety. Temporary because

(02:39):
I love wine, though not drinking, I've kept to my routines,
visiting my favorite wine bars during the weekends to chat
and catch up with friends who worked there. Why should
these small businesses be deprived of my custom? As they
say here in London, watching wine being served to happy
customers is also good discipline for my resolve. But it's

(02:59):
been hard. I sigh whenever the baristas utter particularly alluring
words champagne, borjolais, gammet, grenache, pino noir, the occasional reference
to von Romane another scary pronunciation. Place names excite me.
The slopes of Etna, the Rhone Valley, Sager Manuel. Technical

(03:22):
terms become magical, biodynamic, mallow, lacto, fermentation, dosage. I feel
no temptation. However, with bino grigio, I remain a snob.
If I'd thought to get used to teetotaling, Selinger became
a supplemental antidote to temperance when she writes about imagining
the vineyards, the gravel, the taste of wine running through stone.

(03:46):
I'm reminded about how wine is liquid memory of time
and place. As much as I appreciate the new non
alcoholic alternatives to wine, including the appropriately named lantidote, which
is concocted at the juice of gas may grapes and herbs,
these don't have the electricity of fermented fruit of the vine.
It is a beautiful paradox that rot should so vivify

(04:11):
our enjoyment of food and of life itself. When I
begin to drink again, I will value the time apart
from wine. As one veteran British comedian used to say,
how can I miss you if you won't go away?
Sellinger is also illuminating about the business of selling wine.
The next time a server is seducing you to have

(04:33):
just one more glass of a particular bottle, remember what
folks in the business call a case break. That's a
deal where distributors throw in a case or cases of
a specific wine if the restaurant buys a large quantity.
That means the glass you decide to have is pure
profit for the establishment. Premium brand hard liquor, on the

(04:55):
other hand, is much more expensive for restaurants to procure
managers try to keep a tight rain on the stock.
It was a reason Sellinger ended up being fired from
a job. Doing arithmetic while enjoying a heady meal is annoying,
but sell a Rat's account of restaurant accounting will hopefully
make me think twice when I'm tempted to have one
more glass than I ought. I'm all for helping out

(05:17):
of business, but I don't want to be the patsy
you can count on to boost your bottom line. As
much as I enjoyed sections at the beginning of the book,
Salinger then proceeds with her real intentions, and this is
where the narrative becomes a mess of motives. As promised
in the subtitle, Seller Rat goes after the terrible toxic

(05:38):
situation in the hospitality industry. The author portrays herself as
a survivor of the abusive drug suffused dysfunction that is
curtained off from expensive dining rooms. She careers from a
Massachusetts bar where she suffers a broken nose, to a
succession of fancy eateies in Manhattan, almost all involving bad

(05:59):
dating decisions and run ins with what passes for professional management.
She's come back from all this to settle scores. This
book is in many ways an extended yet attenuated espri
descalier literally spirit up the stairs, the acid and witty
retort you don't think of until you've left the party,

(06:20):
and it's too late to make a difference in the
confrontation that stung you. While some of her targets may
deserve come uppens, a lot of the attacks and sell
a rat seem petty no matter how much she tries
to rationalize them. There are gratuitors, slurs and add hominum insults,
sound and fury signifying I'm not sure what. There are

(06:41):
enough real people named in the book, and yet Selinger
tries to cover herself with a note at the beginning
this is a work of creative non fiction. While the
events are true, they may not be factual. It all
gives the impression of being the socially scorned high school
valedictorian who never got to hang with the cool kid
and then starts a whisper campaign against them. All of

(07:03):
this diluted vitriol is splashed in chapters that end with recipes.
I know that's a formula pushed on food writers by
book editors, but sellinger defends their inclusion as another mode
of creative expression. They add nothing to her narrative and
make the book seem even less coherent. Revenge is a

(07:24):
dish best served cold, not with directions to buy a
truffle slicer from William's Sonoma