Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

Does anyone come to New York clean? I’m afraid not.

“Why did you choose New York?” asked Howard, the general manager. “I thought you were going to ask me why I chose this restaurant,” I said. “Let’s start with New York.” I knew from books, movies, and Sex and the City how I was supposed to answer. I’ve always dreamed of living here, they say. They stress the word dreamed, lengthen it, to make it sound true. I knew so many said: I came here to be a singer/dancer/actress/photographer/painter. In finance/fashion/publishing. I came here to be powerful/beautiful/wealthy. This always seemed to mean: I’m stopping here to become someone else. I said, “It really didn’t feel like a choice. Where else is there to go?” “Ah,” he said. “It’s a bit of a calling, isn’t it?”

“Yes. When the plates are ready I bring them out and serve them to customers.” “You mean guests.” “Guests?” “Your guests.”

“We are creating the world as it should be. We don’t have to pay any attention to how it is.”

You know, just memorize the table numbers and positions, stack plates up along your arm, know all the menu items and their ingredients, never let the water levels drop, never spill a drop of wine, bus the tables cleanly, mise-en-place, fire orders, know the basic characteristics of the basic grape varieties and basic regions of the entire wine world, know the origins of the tuna, pair a wine with the foie gras, know the type of animal the cheeses come from, know what is pasteurized, what contains gluten, what contains nuts, where the extra straws are, how to count. Know how to show up on time.

“Congratulations,” she said in monotone, like her clothes. “These are your stripes.” I put them in my locker and stared at them. I wasn’t training anymore. I had a job. At the most popular restaurant in New York City. I fingered the shirts and it happened: The escape was complete. I put on navy stripes. I thought I felt a breeze. It was as if I were coming out of anesthesia. I saw, I recognized, a person.

TERROIR. I looked it up in The World Atlas of Wine in the manager’s office. The definition was people talking around it without identifying it. It seemed a bit far-fetched. That food had character, composed of the soil, the climate, the time of year. That you could taste that character. But still. An idea mystical enough to be highly seductive.

Have you been to Ssäm bar yet?

Table 43 is industry—Per Se?

“You know, nobody is from here. We were all new. And like I always say, it’s just dinner.”

“What are you drinking, Billy Bob?” “Can I get a hit of Fernet while I think about it?”

“Cheers,” she said gravely. “Cheers.” “No, in the eyes, new girl.”

“Do you do this every night?” “Do what?” I nodded toward my glass of Boxler that refilled itself every time my eyes were averted. To the half-empty wine bottles that lined the bar for consumption. To Nicky eating cocktail olives while he and Scott told each other to fuck their mothers. To Lou’s gravelly serenade coasting down on us through a film of smoke. To the row of us, unkempt, glassy and damp, sweating drinks in our hands. “This?” Ariel waved away the smoke in front of my face, waved it away like it was nothing. “We’re just having our shift drink.”

WHEN I STARTED they told me, You have no experience. New York experience is all that counts.

“This place is a love shack, darlin’. Try to keep your panties on.”

Ariel pointed to different tables and said, “Blue Water, Gotham, Gramercy, some retards from Babbo, and so on.” I nodded.

“There are condos there now,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. My head was getting difficult to prop up. “All these half-finished, empty buildings. They’ll never fill them. There are no people.” “You are condos, new girl,” Sasha said.

It is a strange pressure to be across from a man who wants something that you don’t want to give. It’s like standing in a forceful current, which at first you think is not too strong, but the longer you stand, the more tired you become, the harder it is to stay upright.

You were a compendium of disposable information that people burned up while they drank and escaped their lives.

“I’m giving you permission to take yourself seriously. To take the stuff of this world seriously. And to start having. That’s abundance.”

The people who remained on this pared-down crew were usually mildly hungover at best, actively ill at worst.

WHAT TIME is it?” I leaned toward the touch-screen terminal where Simone was breaking down an order. Her hand shot out and covered my eyes. “Never look! Once you look it stops moving altogether. It’s best to be surprised when it comes.”

I became aware of the ballet of it. The choreography never rehearsed, always learned midperformance. The reason you felt like everyone was staring at you when you were new is because they were. You were out of sync.

As I walked, I repeated the street names like they had the permanence of numerals: Bond, Bleecker, Houston, Prince, Spring. Lust rubied my blood, gave me the gait of an uncaught criminal, and I felt like I could walk forever.

where is the Billecart? Let’s revisit it.” She inspected champagne flutes.

“Champagne is the fulcrum of the terroir debate. It expresses two disparate positions. The first is that this is proof of terroir’s existence: the chalk content in the soil, the cold northern climate, the slow second fermentation. These wines can only come from one place in the world. You taste it”—she sipped—“and you know it’s Champagne.” I

“Are you a writer?” “Hmm. A writer. I try to engage in the task of setting something true on paper. But if you take art too seriously you wind up killing yourself. Do you know what I mean?”

“Emily Dickinson?” “It’s time to revisit the patron saint of wild nights.” “Emily Dickinson?” “Just enjoy it.

Sometimes my sadness felt so deep it must have been inherited.

“I want…I mean, I want more than to do a good job. I want to take each experience on the pulse.” “Ha!” He slammed the wall above me. “She’s quoting Keats to you? You’re too malleable to be around her.”

“What would your last meal be?” I asked suddenly. That was a night when I thought it would be all right if my life ended. “A really long omakase. Like at least thirty-four courses. I want Yesuda to cook them himself. He puts the soy sauce on with a paintbrush.” “Salmon pastrami from Russ and Daughters. A ton of bagels. Like three bagels.” “In-N-Out double double.”

“A roast chicken—I would eat the entire thing by hand. And I guess a DRC. When else would I taste that kind of Burgundy?” “Blinis, caviar, and crème fraîche. Done and done. Some impossible Champagne, Krug, or a culty one like the Selosse, drunk out of the bottle.”

It was about him, but it was also not him. I longed for satiation but was terrified of it. I wanted to live in this queasy moment of fantasy for as long as possible.

“Why do you know so much?” “I’ve been doing this a long time.” “No, everyone here has been doing this a long time. You know what I mean.” “I find it impossible to do anything without investing in it. Even server work.” “This job was supposed to be easy.” “All jobs are easy for people averse to using their brains. I’m in a slight but stately minority who believes that dining is an art, just like life.”

“You read too much Henry Miller,” I said to him. “That’s why you think you can treat girls like this.”

Nicky picked up the truffle in his bare hand and delivered it to bar 11. He shaved it from high above the guest’s plate. Freshly tilled earth, fields of manure, the forest floor after a rain. I smelled berries, upheaval, mold, sheets sweated through a thousand times. Absolute sex.

“Finally,” said Nicky, and replaced the truffle. He leaned back on the bar, wearing a handsome, self-satisfied smile. “You never forget your first snow in New York.”

What I learned, as he slipped his fingers out of my mouth and back inside me, is that in New York City there are absolutely no rules. I didn’t understand that monstrous freedom until Jake said into my mouth, Come for me, and I came in the back of a cab. There were people who did whatever the fuck they wanted and their city was terrifying, barbaric, and breathless.

I wondered how there was any room for the guests, with all of our hopeful faces and our imposing loneliness.

VESELKA, three a.m. I was slowly but surely falling in love with the food of the Eastern Bloc,

Everyone has a price. I caught your yawn. Yeah, mine is anything above twenty percent.

But it smells like garbage and Fernet in there.

They could spend the rest of the week asking their friends if they knew that the Rhône produced a small amount of white wine. White wine from the Rhône? their buttoned-up friends would say. Yes, had they heard of a Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blanc? No? Then the guests would repeat to their friends verbatim what Heather had said to them: “This wine is fairly obscure, something of a secret…”

Howard couldn’t see what I was seeing. The bar beginning to glow under the low lamps, the music ascending, Nicky opening the house red, jaunty, people shuffling in, the magic of the restaurant emerging as if from a more perfect world of forms.

Jake’s sense of ownership of his surroundings incrementally increased as we left Union Square. By the time we passed Houston to the south, or A to the east, he was fully in possession.

“It’s happening so much faster than I anticipated,” said Simone. “When they changed the zoning laws in 2005, we knew that the end was coming. Friends lost their lofts left and right, but the speed with which it all disappeared…” “2005. So I just missed it,” I said. “I thought so.” “We always just miss New York.

We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared.”

“Do you miss it?” I asked. “The golden handcuffs? Besides the backbreaking labor and turning into a nocturnal zombie and the general cattiness.” She paused and appraised me as if I were about to go up for auction. “Of course I miss it. It’s family.” “Yes.” I felt a kinship with Samantha. I would with anyone who came in and announced that they had once worked at the restaurant. We shared—even if she had covered it up with jewelry and skin serums—a muscle memory. We had both broken down wine boxes in the cellar, we had both learned how to tell when Chef was heating up, we had the same aches in our necks and lower backs. “I feel really lucky.” “You are. You’ll never be luckier.”

“I still like Dave Matthews Band,” he said. “That’s kind of embarrassing.” “No,” I said. “Nothing you do is ever embarrassing. You’re not a girl.”

A new ticket printed and Scott glanced at it while holding out the asparagus special toward me. The poached egg on top jiggled. He kept staring at the ticket. “Piiiiiicking up,” I said again, and reached my arms out farther to grab the plate. He dropped it to the counter and the egg slipped off. Chef looked up sharply. Scott, drained of color, said, “The health department’s here.”