The workplace tell-all is an irresistible form of storytelling, and restaurants are among the most alluring of workplaces: hot and frenetic and physically taxing, with a permissive social culture of drugs and sex, they’re a crucible for drama. Peering into the restaurant world affords readers the sort of insidery info-dump that is delightfully prurient to consume, like going backstage at a show normally viewed only from gilded boxes. Half the appeal of “Kitchen Confidential” was learning not to order fish on Mondays. But the litany of rules and secrets and rituals that make up kitchen life may also be part of why it’s been so hard to successfully translate a restaurant story from the page to the screen. The same detailed flourishes that in a book make for riveting scene-setting can become, in the mouths of actors, plodding exposition or pedantic fussiness. When “Kitchen Confidential” was turned into a half-hour sitcom starring a young Bradley Cooper, in 2005, the network pulled it after just three episodes.
“Sweetbitter,” a half-hour restaurant show that débuted Sunday night, on Starz, adapted by the writer Stephanie Danler from her dishy 2016 novel of the same name, tries its hardest to avoid that fate. The story follows Tess, a twentysomething from an unnamed nowheresville who arrives in New York, bearing a suitcase and the keys to a sublet, and in short order lands a job at a very swank Manhattan restaurant—a paid training period at the end of which she hopes to be hired as a backwaiter (something like a fancy busboy). The restaurant is never named—it is simply The Restaurant, monolithic, home and school and temple all in one. A dining-savvy viewer may recognize it—its aesthetic, its mood, its geography—as Union Square Cafe, the first and most iconic restaurant of the hospitality titan Danny Meyer. Tess, whose only experience is a server gig at her hometown coffee shop, flubs the pop quiz of an interview (“What are the five noble grapes of Bordeaux?”), but is nevertheless welcomed into the ranks of one of the city’s most tightly guarded teams. Stepping into her first day of work all hesitance and blunders, she’s taken under the wing of Simone (played by Caitlin FitzGerald with hypnotic, icy elegance), the restaurant’s senior server and wine expert. She develops an instant, animalistic crush on Jake, a sullen, bad-boy bartender. Will, her minder and trainer, develops an instant crush on her.
In our time of chef worship, most restaurant stories, from “Kitchen Confidential” to the 2015 movie “Burnt” (why does Bradley Cooper play a chef so often?) are set in the kitchen: odes to the precision of knife work and the bantering brutality of working the line. The revelation of Danler’s novel was in showing that the “front of house,” while an entirely different foxhole, is just as dramatically fertile ground. The preparation of food, in this version of the restaurant story, is peripheral—“Sweetbitter” is about the servers and bartenders, who run nightly half-marathons between kitchen and floor, tending and soothing their casually moneyed patrons. At Tess’s restaurant (as at its real-world counterpart), service is paramount. Staff do not simply take orders and provide food; they’re paid to say yes, to be unflappably kind to their customers (who, in classic Danny Meyer-speak, are called not customers but “guests”), to project joy in anticipating and fulfilling their needs—a shot of sherry in the soup of an elderly lush, a stack of extra napkins for a regular with an eating disorder. The care that the staff shows to one other, however—or to themselves—is in constant flux, spiking and crashing, a ricochet between tenderness and loathing. “I became aware of the ballet of it,” Danler writes of Tess’s work, which is never far from being a metaphor for her relationships. “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.”
In Danler’s novel, Tess is our Virgil, guiding us through this alluring new world; we travel with her, seeing what she sees, hearing what she hears. On television, the lens goes the other way—what we see above all is Tess, at the center of almost every scene. To the show’s detriment, she is often the least interesting person in the room, a wide-eyed bundle of naïveté, neuroses, and stammering apology. The social life of the restaurant staff is fuelled by drugs, and Tess says yes to any pill she’s offered, swallowing first and asking what it is later. But she is oddly shocked by how casually her co-workers seem to hop into bed with one another, which makes me wonder whether she lied on her résumé about having worked in the industry before. Tess’s life outside the restaurant is surrounded by mystery—she’s never met her roommate, she hints at a dark family background, even her name is never uttered out loud until the final episode—but she moves through it all with dreamlike passivity. Her co-workers repeatedly discuss her empathetic nature, though we as viewers are never granted the chance to actually see it. Tess’s colleagues, too, have one-note identifiers: the foreigner, the black woman, the lesbian. Next to Tess—small-town American, white, straight—their drive to prove themselves in the buttoned-up conservatism of a high-end restaurant only serves to emphasize her easy blandness, and undermines the show’s desire to paint her as a plucky, damaged, sympathetic striver.
Much of “Sweetbitter” is a direct adaptation of Danler’s novel (in the first few episodes, even background chatter is an almost word-for-word quotation of the text), but the vignettes that prove to be the most interesting add new, made-for-TV twists. The most compelling story line plays out in the background, across the entire series: a drama involving Jake, the distant object of Tess’s lust, and Simone, her mentor. The two are intimately connected to one another, though the precise nature of their relationship (as well as the circumstances that strain it) are revealed only a sliver at a time. A set of hostile scenes in the final episode led to a reveal as gratifying as any in recent memory. But I was left feeling like I’d been given the wrong show—watching a story focussed around Tess was like watching a sitcom about a New Jersey therapist whose clients just happen to include a mob boss. Moving from Jake and Simone back to the will-she-or-won’t-she of Tess’s final service exams was a deflating anticlimax. Much of “Sweetbitter” is, in effect, a training montage: Tess learns to carry three plates at once. Tess learns to pour water. Tess is instructed in the ways of wine. The events in “Sweetbitter” cover only the first half of Danler’s novel, so presumably Starz has a second season in the works. Tess messes up the exam, but she will be granted another chance.
Sourse: newyorker.com
