Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler: book review

Sweetbitter (2016) is set in a Union Square, New York City, restaurant over the course of one year.

Twenty-two-year-old Tess, from the country, moves to New York to make something of herself. She lands a job in a busy restaurant as a backwaiter. Backwaiting consists of three shifts: food running (carrying plates of food to the table of guests), dining room (resetting tables), and beverage running (assisting with drinks). Tess wants to become the best possible backwaiter.

‘Silence was observed in the kitchen. People entered on tiptoe … The silence may have helped the cooks but it made learning anything difficult to impossible.’

It’s about the year of Tess’s life as a backwaiter, amid all of its daily routines and interactions with her co-workers.

Tess likes the handsome Russian bartender, even though her female co-workers advise her not to get involved with him. Tess also likes Simone, the ‘longest serving server’ in the restaurant: an older woman who teaches Tess about wine.

Divided into the four seasons (Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring) and interspersed with food definitions and poetry, this novel is about coming-of-age in a big city. But there is no plot, merely a meandering story of a scatty directionless young woman interacting with undeveloped characters. Overall, it’s a rather insipid, tasteless tale.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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