Hannah Selinger Examines the Underbelly of the Restaurant Industry From a Personal Lens

When Hannah Selinger sat down at her computer in July 2020 to process her feelings in the best way writers know how — by writing — she was not yet aware of just how far that choice was going to take her.

Selinger, 44, was living at her home in Springs at the time, having decamped from her home in New York City, like many, to escape the COVID-19 madness.

In June of that year, Peter Meehan, the celebrated Los Angeles Times food editor, had been pushed out of his job after being credibly accused of sexual harassment and creating a hostile working environment during his tenure.

Years ago, Selinger had worked tangentially with Meehan, so she followed the story with interest. What struck her in 2020, many years after leaving the restaurant industry she’d given her heart and soul to, was that while Meehan was facing accountability for what he’d done, someone else who should have been experiencing the same consequences was not.

For seven months starting in 2008, Selinger worked as the corporate beverage director for Meehan’s frequent collaborator, David Chang, the celebrity chef and creator of the wildly successful restaurant chain Momofuku. Chang’s memoir, “Eat a Peach,” was published in 2020, chronicling both his upbringing and meteoric rise in the industry, which eventually included successful podcasts, television shows and the creation of his own food empire.

Selinger and others experienced a similar hostile work environment while employed by Chang, expected to put up with what she and others have said was the same kind of abusive behavior that many other men with a big reputation in the food world, like Meehan, were being called to task for — things like wall-punching, desk-breaking, violent threats and screaming.

She wrote a 6,000-word essay about that experience for Eater at the end of 2020.

That essay went viral, and was eventually nominated for a James Beard Award.

The story could have ended there — catharsis, achieved, mission accomplished: check.

But that’s not what happened.

The response to the essay, from people who had worked for Chang and others cut from the same cloth as him, was overwhelming, Selinger said. And a new realization began to dawn on her in the aftermath of its publication — she had more to say. A lot more.

“It was bad working for Chang, but it was also bad at a lot of places,” she said, during an interview this spring.

That’s how “Cellar Rat” was born.

“Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly,” written by Selinger, was published by Hatchette Book Group, an imprint of Little Brown, in March. In it, Selinger shares a firsthand account of what it was like working as both a server and sommelier for several high-end restaurants at the top of the heap in the ultra-competitive and high-pressure dining world in New York City in the early 2000s, and what led her to ultimately leave that industry in 2014 and pursue a different kind of life as a journalist.

On the surface, “Cellar Rat” is a book about the restaurant industry. But it’s really so much more than that.

“First and foremost, this is a feminist book,” Selinger said while speaking over Zoom from the home she shares with her husband, Dan, and two children, Nathaniel, now 8, and Miles, 6.

“It’s a book about the way women are treated in the world in general. I think it’s compelling to anyone who has walked through the world and has felt mistreated, but it’s framed through my experiences.”

Indeed, she makes it clear in the prologue that this is a book that isn’t afraid to examine trauma, and how it can shape a person.

“When you’re taught, early on, that, in order to be loved, you have to put up with being harmed, you seek out the world’s least comfortable scenarios,” she writes in the prologue. “In restaurants I wasn’t a victim; I was tough and resilient, and that made me desirable.”

Since leaving the restaurant industry for good, Selinger has certainly landed on her feet.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Cut, Wine Enthusiast and more, and she’s been nominated for several awards. She is also a regular contributor to The Express Magazine.

In the book, which Selinger wrote while raising two young children, she delves into part of her early life and upbringing, her “love affair” with restaurants, and how that love of restaurants and working in them became complicated over time. She also speaks glowingly about her experience working at Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton, at the tail end of her career, and how that was, in contrast to other jobs she’d had, a positive experience.

“‘Cellar Rat,’” Selinger said, is “a feminist reclaiming of things that happened,” and she said she was buoyed by the feedback she’s received from many women who have read the book.

“Many of them said, ‘This really resonates with me and really reflects the experience I had; I feel seen and heard,’” she said.

Selinger began working on the book in earnest after signing a book deal in 2023. While the COVID lockdown was starting to recede into the rearview mirror at that point, she said it was still not easy revisiting everything that had happened over the course of a career she’d left long ago.

“I didn’t give enough credit to what diving back into 20 years of trauma was going to be like,” she said. “So I approached it like I approach reporting. I had to do fact-checking on myself.”

Luckily, Selinger said, she had saved all her work emails from that period of time, which was enormously helpful. She also reached out to former co-workers, to corroborate her recollections of events and time periods.

She admitted that writing the book was “fairly triggering” and uncomfortable at times.

“You think you’re putting something to bed, but you have to revisit it over and over,” she said.

Much of what she was writing about, of course, had to pass legal review, but Selinger said that by the time she was writing the book, accusations about Chang’s behavior had become public — thanks in no small part to her Eater essay — and he had responded. (Chang said that while he could not recall the specific moments and details that Selinger shared in her book, that kind of behavior was “consistent” with how he acted at that time, and he apologized for that).

Of course, Chang wasn’t the only bad actor that Selinger encountered during her time in the industry.

In Chapter 5 of the book, Selinger talks about an untoward sexual encounter from Johnny Iuzzini, the pastry chef at the world-famous Jean-Georges restaurant — where Selinger worked for a period of time — who was accused of sexual assault by several others. Selinger wrote about that experience in an article in The Guardian.

When it comes to what Selinger hopes readers take away from her book and the recounting of everything she experienced, what she has in mind is simple. Despite all the ugliness she encountered during that time of her life, Selinger is not bitter or jaded. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“The way I feel about restaurants is that I’m optimistic that they’re capable of change,” she said. “I think we can do better.”

More progressive labor laws would be a start, she said, and added that the traditional power structures in restaurants, where “one guy” has all the power and it filters down, should change. The abusive, many-hours-long shifts that restaurants workers are expected to endure should be addressed, too, she said. Providing more access to health insurance and time off on holidays would go a long way as well.

“I want it to be a better work environment, where we can sustain these places where people go to experience joy,” she said. “But where, on the other end, people are working so hard for so little.”

“Cellar Rat” is a feminist book, a book for anyone who has ever been mistreated, anyone who values the idea of speaking truth to power and attempting to dismantle systems of abuse. But choosing to write it, Selinger said, was also an act of love.

“I don’t hate restaurants — I love restaurants,” she said. “In a way, this is a love letter to restaurants. I want them to be a better place for the worker.”