REVIEW: Cellar Rat by Hannah Selinger

Reviewed by Layla Khoury-Hanold

In Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly (Little, Brown and Company; March 2025), author Hannah Selinger charts her rise and fall as a former sommelier and restaurant worker in some of New York’s most lauded restaurants. The book unspools like the best meals, both literally and figuratively, with many chapters anchored by standout dishes that Selinger either served to discerning clientele or sampled herself and is written in sharp prose shot through with acerbic wit.

The book begins with Selinger’s humble restaurant beginnings, which are lighter in tone, like an amuse-bouche, then works its way to more substantial, meaty passages that are wrought with more technique, on the page as on the plate.

One of the book’s most poignant chapters, chapter 5 “Fourplay,” is also one of Cellar Rat’s most chilling. It was from this point on that I read the book with my heart in my throat. Selinger recounts in intimate detail a scene of unwanted sex with Johnny Iuzzini, then the pastry chef at four-star restaurant Jean-Georges when he was regarded as an-industry wunderkind.

Whether Selinger was cognizant of it at the time or if she gleaned this insight with retrospection, she writes “Johnny wasn’t an artist. He was something more twisted, more grotesque. Deep within me, there was a black, hardened tree, the branches of which had been growing almost my entire life, the angry scars of mistreatment. There it was: anger. I was so fucking angry. Angry in the way that women are not permitted to be.”

Before we get to those scenes, the chapter opens with an account of the seed of trauma planted at the hands of her stepfather, who chased her around the house and sometimes grabbed her by the roots of her hair. “This man, this adult man at 6 feet 4 inches, bringing a rag-doll little girl up to her bedroom, for she had been bad, in whatever capacity bad means when you are a child. And yet, when it was over, I came crawling back, as children do, desperate for this love.”

Here, we understand why she stayed in restaurants, beyond the addictive, electric rush of working a service; restaurant work has a hold on Selinger because she does not think she deserves to be treated better. It is yet another powerful force in her life from which she is trying to wrest love and approval. She writes “The punishment of restaurants felt familiar. I came back, again and again, to places that punched me down, to places that brought me back to the dynamic that, unhealthily, mimicked the one that I had been brought up in.”

Selinger isn’t shy about naming names and calling out bad actors, but she plumbs her own emotional depths to lay her own professional mistakes and personal shortcomings bare. With the gift of hindsight, she can hold herself accountable for her flaws and foibles as well as the systems and powerful personalities that pushed on her trauma like a deep bruise. It takes fortitude to put these experiences to paper with such vulnerability and emotional resonance that it fuels the pacing in such a propulsive way that the reader feels they are experiencing it alongside her. Intellectually we know that the author will be okay, but we aren’t sure how much more abuse she can withstand and at what emotional cost.

To write a book that is this raw, this generous is no small feat, given the unsavory characters that loom large in the dining rooms, cellars and kitchens of Selinger’s past and her childhood alike. And it is generous, because in sharing her story, Selinger is giving voice to the unseen labor and emotional toll that the restaurant industry takes on its workers, especially women and marginalized groups.

Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly should be required reading not only for those curious about restaurant work but for anyone who loves dining out in restaurants (especially fine dining). It is a must-read for anyone who wants a behind-the-scenes, name-drop, tell-all tale of New York City’s fine dining restaurants and worthy of adding to your bookshelf if you appreciate biting prose and emotionally cutting memoirs.