Maybe, Chef!
In which Ally and Thom discuss Sweetbitter and Bourdain and The Bear (oh my!). It's not HBO, it's Further Reading!
TN: You're late.
AS: I'm a mess today.
TN: Ally’s late and she spilled my drink. Twice.
AS: Clumsy girl in a rom-com with a publishing job.
TN: To set the scene: we're in the back patio of Lucky Shrike. In many ways, it's our first (un-ticketed, un-advertised) live show. We should tell the people the major update and the reason for your—but also, fine, our—lateness in delivering Further Reading 3.
AS: If we must.
TN: Ally sold out.
AS: Big time.
TN: Which means she is no longer working at Flying Books, and is instead working for Knopf!
AS: I'm what they call an intern.
TN: Enough about you! Today we're talking about the other big news, which is that Flying Books has opened a second location!
AS: Yay!
TN: [Three] months ago now, so it's not exactly breaking news, but it may be breaking to you, our readers, who are an international crowd and may not have a finger on the pulse of the Toronto bar scene.
AS: Surprising number of you in Berlin.
TN: I don’t find that surprising. The rumours are true: we have opened, in partnership with Peter Pan Bistro, a bookshop-wine-bar-cafe called Flying Books at Neverland. And so, for this edition of Further Reading, we are going to be discussing restaurants as a setting for fiction—fine-dining, specifically—and the characters that inhabit this space. In a recent Flying Books newsletter, we had tasked our readers to read the novel Service by Sarah Gilmartin in preparation for this publication. Cherished subscribers: no one read that book. Instead, I read—at one of my ex-server friend’s behest—the novel Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler. Ally, you read...
BOTH: Nothing.
AS: Wait, no! I did read, during some of my last shifts at Flying Books (🥲), a compilation of Anthony Bourdain’s tour diaries.
TN: Anthony Bourdain is someone I’m keen to learn more about because, honestly, I know so little about him—but we’ll get to him later. First, I wanted to ask you, Ally: have you ever worked in a restaurant or bar?
AS: I had a restaurant job for a second.
TN: How long was that second?
AS: Truly one shift. There was something sketchy going on, I was fifteen, it didn’t pan out. I guess the closest I've come is working front-of-house in a bakery for about six months. So I've dabbled, but not to the degree we’re talking about here. All the bakers came in much earlier and were wrapping up by the time I arrived to start selling, the worlds were very separate.
TN: What you touched on there that I’m particularly interested in is that front-of-house, back-of-house dichotomy; there's this idea of the engine behind the facade, which is what I find gives the setting its dramatic thrust. I mentioned in our last issue that my mother was a restaurant critic and food-writer, so I spent a lot of time in restaurants growing up. What’s fun for me about our new space next to Peter Pan Bistro—we’re connected at the back—is that I get to tangentially participate in and observe the side I wasn’t privy to. I think, as a baseline, that kitchens are exciting settings because there’s an elemental quality: skilled professionals making beautiful things from raw and fresh ingredients with fire and hot water and sharp knives. Still, setting alone is not enough to create compulsive fiction. What else might contribute is this very specific personality type that seems to—at least in our cultural imagination—inhabit those spaces?
AS: You have thoughts on this.
TN: I do. I mentioned this to you earlier—
AS: Off-pod.
TN: Yeah, I was talking about how I think there's an interesting inverted gender-structure from the domestic to professional kitchen, because the cultural image of chefs are these vagabonds—tattoos and bandanas and generally quite pirate-like. Which is in stark contrast to the usual clientele of fine dining. Is there this notion that maybe—bear with me—the participation of men elevates this traditionally domestic—ergo, feminine—work of preparing food? They're like, “We do this seriously so we have to be incredibly uptight about our work in order to aggrandize it.”
AS: Yes.
TN: In this world of fine-dining, as depicted in The Bear and Sweetbitter, there's this real lustre, while behind-the-scenes the language is blue, the demeanors are brusque, and intense, and self-important.
AS: I think there’s a glamourizing of both narratives in opposing ways, where on one hand you have these highly curated and glamorous spaces, and on the other hand there’s this romantic idea of the struggle, of the grind required to create those spaces.
TN: Maybe it's also that men feel license to express the back-breaking work of feeding people and we don't allow that in women.
AS: And there are, obviously, women who work in these kitchens—
TN: But there’s a big gap! Only 20% of head chef positions in the US are held by women.
AS: So it makes sense we have this image in our heads of the kind of character we are referencing.
TN: Though women are featured very heavily in this dynamic, just more often as front of house, as servers. Neither of us have properly worked in service, so for this episode I reached out to my friend Sorcha for some insider’s information. She lived in Copenhagen, a very famous food city, where she worked as server. Sorcha is partially the inspiration for this episode, seeing as she has been telling me to read Sweetbitter for as long as I've known her. She cites it all the time when trying to elucidate that experience of that time in her life.
AS: Oh, I didn't know that.
TN: The novel was released in 2016. It follows a 22-year-old woman who leaves her hometown for New York City with no idea what she's going to do. She walks into a restaurant, nails the interview because she is the protagonist and therefore special. And there she falls into this kind of strange, almost Gothic love-triangle with a bartender who's twenty-nine—and, it should be said, a total loser—and the general manager of the restaurant, Simone, who is hilariously intense. They have some never-disclosed relationship that’s familial, but also maybe sexual, and generally they seem caught in quite an intense psychic loop. In any other novel that would be the A-plot, but it all comes second to the language; the prose is gorgeous and sharp, it was honestly such a pleasure to read. It works in the mode of a bildungsroman as this woman learns, under the tutelage of Simone, to take herself seriously, while also developing a coke addiction. I asked Sorcha all the time while reading if this is what it is really like, and she told me it is and it isn't, but it’s exactly what it feels like. And that's the real arc of the novel: this woman engaging in and then waking up from a fantasy. And despite the high highs of her time at the restaurant and the pulp of this bizarro love triangle, the novel might not be as far-fetched as I assumed. I think probably some experiences and some entire periods of our lives do feel like fantasy as we’re in them! Pardon me, I’m really yammering, but there's a quote that Sorcha actually told me to look out for, down to the page number. In the scene, a guy from our protagonist’s high school comes to the restaurant and they speak. Tess is suddenly self-conscious about her job, speaking to an old classmate who’s in a suit and showing around his visiting parents:
I wanted to say: my life is full. I chose this life because it's a constant assault of color and taste and light and it's raw and ugly and fast and it's mine and you'll never understand. Until you live it, you don't know.
And that is almost word-for-word how Sorcha describes it. Okay—saying this out loud, now, maybe that’s because she's read the book. But Ally, I wanted to ask you, what are your feelings about the television program The Bear?
AS: So, my immediate thought on The Bear is that it is fine.
TN: Hey, Ally—well said.
AS: Harsh words of a critic. I think The Bear has a wonderful cast—particularly Ebon Moss-Bachrach, whom I have obviously loved since Girls, and Ayo Edeberi, whom I've always loved as a comedian—very funny. I don't think the show is very funny.
TN: Golden Globe for Best Comedy.
AS: I'm very happy for all of Ayo’s success. Very happy for all of their success in general. But it's not a comedy. It has funny-ish moments, but overall you have some really funny actors who don't get to be very funny.
TN: What frustrates me about The Bear is the way that all of the characters get angry in the exact same way.
AS: Yes.
TN: Whenever the kitchen gets hectic, all of the characters reach the same fever-pitch. For example, it doesn't ring true to me that someone as sensible and level as Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) would… threaten Richie with a knife? The whole show is an exercise in ratcheting the tension, but only in one mode of shouting and cursing and generalized chaos. And sure: Carmy, the main character, is maybe trying to recreate a perfect domestic life via this restaurant, feel closer to his late brother. He's trying to make delicious, thoughtfully-constructed dishes and serve them to happy people who don’t actually exist in the universe of this show—there is a built-in pathos there which I find affecting, but I think it gets somewhat overshadowed by a homogeneity of tension.
AS: The show seemingly sets out to critique the chef as this kind of isolated, mentally ill, fucked-up but genius artist who doesn't care about anything other than his work, and there’s that push and pull with the people at once trying to help him fulfill his goals as he continues to isolate himself—all in service of this amazing work. And it's funny when that thing is food, because food is, on one hand, so practical. It's there and then it's gone. It’s in part aesthetics, in part taste, but ultimately it differentiates itself from other art because instead of ‘feeding your soul’ it literally feeds you, it's about sustenance and nutrition.
TN: It can do both!
AS: Certainly, but at what cost? I think The Bear interacts a lot with the idea of this rough, tough chef for whom everything is off the rails, because that product is above all else. And you have to look like shit, you have to feel like shit. You have to be off the wagon and chain-smoking cigarettes, because this is what it takes. And without that, you're not really in it. You're not authentic. And I think a lot of that myth has to do with Anthony Bourdain, whom I love.
TN: Okay, segue!
AS: I do think that [Bourdain] is a key figure responsible for, you know, developing this myth of the chef in popular culture.
TN: I know nothing. Can you tell me a little bit? Rough bio?
AS: I would not say I'm a Bourdain scholar by any means—and really, if I'm being completely honest, as a Tumblr sort of girly, I'm sure I was seeing his picture everywhere. And I was like, “He looks hot and cool. Who is this man?” and came upon Kitchen Confidential as this essential text. It’s the chronicle of Bourdain’s early career in kitchens, where he became infatuated with the romance of these older chefs slinging fish guts, smoking all day, drinking late into the evening, kind of roughneck talking. He has this perverse pleasure in the brutal ways in which he earned his chops.
TN: It's funny, the role of a chef does sort of provide a structured outlet to certain juvenile, maybe specifically… male… sensibilities? You focus on the task quite literally at hand; you get to play with knives and pyrotechnics and take smoke breaks and cuss at each other and shout, but the final result is something antithetical to that, comforting and finely-tuned, almost sensuous. But isn’t there this all part of a debunked, cultural myth, that kitchens are rough and tumble and run by cowboys? Apparently all the best Michelin-accredited kitchens are pin-drop silent.
AS: Okay. I don't know anything.
TN: As always, I refuse to cite a source.
AS: Sources are antithetical to further reading.
TN: Big time. We should remind our readers, in their millions, that this conversation concerns cultural representations of the kitchen, of the chef, of the restaurant. Don’t get offended for Uncle or Auntie Chef.
AS: But I’m sure the people who go into these professions are also drawn and influenced by portrayals of these places. Like The Bear, I'm sure we're going to get a lot of young men working in kitchens hoping to participate in that intensity and find that kind of purpose.
TN: Well, Anthony Bourdain, he clearly inspired a generation of young men. I know some men—at Peter Pan Bistro, even—working in kitchens who state outright that they are doing this because of him.
AS: He is totemic.
TN: What James Dean is to male actors, Anthony Bourdain is to men who cook.
AS: Say that. Though I think what's interesting about Bourdain is that he both cultivated his own mythology and was very honest about being like, “I was an asshole. It's not interesting to be an asshole.”
TN: How did he rise to prominence? What was his big—
AS: Kitchen Confidential was his breakout book.
TN: Oh, he broke out as a writer!
AS: Well he was never a particularly great chef. And he would say that about himself!
TN: That is so goofy.
AS: It was his personality that broke out. And then he had all these subsequent shows, which were really effective in both disseminating his idea that a life of pleasure should be accessible to all and that food is important and food should be enjoyed, but also exposing different cultures and different economic levels of production within the wider culinary scene. So what we have here is the celebrity chef as opposed to Julia Child, a celebrity in her own right, but one who was very much about empowering people through actual kitchen skills.
TN: A woman who walked the walk and a man who talked the talk!
AS: Absolutely.
TN: I think that's my vague cultural impression, that Bourdain was a man who had a great capacity for connection and he did that through food, through cooking, through sitting down with a stranger and sharing a meal.
AS: I’m hungry.
TN: One component we've entirely ignored in this conversation so far is the patrons, which, from a dramaturgical standpoint, might be the simplest answer as to why restaurants are a fertile setting for fiction: you have a constantly-rotating cast of new characters who each day introduce a new element to the plot. There's sometimes a flirtation, sometimes antagonism, there is often condescension, but there's always this sense of service. The dynamic between patron and proprietor I find a very nuanced and complicated one to navigate. Especially these days, I feel like people have less tolerance for… debasement?
AS: Oh, I think that's true, but does it ever still happen.
TN: At this point my thinking is: sure, treat me like shit, but please, god, do not film me and put me in your TikTok or a Reel, it is insane that we’ve allowed this to become acceptable behaviour.
AS: So true.
TN: There's something unique about the fine dining restaurants where they will do research about the people coming in beforehand.
AS: That's a little on a Nixon-level that I'm not loving.
TN: It is a little Nixon-y, but it's all in the name of providing something beautiful to those people. Which was maybe somewhat less Dick’s intention. The character Simone in Sweetbitter, the general manager, carries all these patrons in her head, remembers facts about them so that she can then make them feel at home, make them feel like family. And that's such an incredible skill! There’s that aphorism, right, that everyone should work in service at some point in their life.
AS: One should never go straight to corporate, it’s true.
TN: Ally, of all people, is best-suited to tell us this. A recent retail-to-corporate transplant.
AS: Having a badge with my face on it scares me.
TN: Are you a lanyard-wearer?
AS: Yes, I am.
TN: Wow. Is that temporary or is it for the rest of your time?
AS: For the rest of my life. Let's get that on record.
TN: The chain around your neck with a little laminated face on it. I just want to say, Ally, congratulations on the new role, and thank you for recording with me today. Many subscribers wondered if it was ever going to happen, and boy did we prove those sickos wrong.
AS: Owned as hell.
TN: What’s next for us?
AS: I mean, we're going into fall, baby: it's campus novel time. Buckle the fuck up.
TN: Oh, well, there we are. My genius co-host has done it again. Should we preview the fall season here now? What's coming in 24, 25 to HBO? Coming this Fall: The Campus Novel and, I am so pleased to announce: Sally Rooney Month.
AS: Yes. Thom will be doing a monologue.
TN: And Ally will occasionally stroke my head and give me water from a little hamster bottle.
AS: And I'll be happy to do it.
TN: Every episode in which I do not mention Sally Rooney is a massive exercise in restraint for me. So, I guess, so far, one exercise in restraint.
AS: Martyr.
TN: I saw a tweet recently that was like, “Oh, you're an independent bookseller? And your staff picks are Elif Batuman and Ben Lerner? Should we have a party? Should we invite Ottessa Moshfegh?”
AS: Yeah, well, whatever.
TN: Do you want to sign off? I feel like I always sign off.
AS: Yeah, I'll sign off by saying...
TN: She’s snatched my iPhone.
AS: I’ll sign off by saying: did I have an existential crisis where I thought about going back to grad school? Of course I did.
TN: Save it for the Campus Novel Pod.
AS: Well, spoiler, I did not follow through, so now I'm just going to be recording a podcast on campus novels.
TN: Verbal asterisk—co-hosting a Substack!
AS: Love you XOXO.
TN: Take yourself out for dinner.
AS: Be nice to your server!
Further Reading is pleased to issue the following amendment: in the month between recording this conversation and publishing this edition, Ally has been promoted from Knopf’s intern to Publishing Assistant, all within two months of being hired.