Workhorse
My Sublime and Absurd Years in New York City's Restaurant Scene
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A razor-sharp look at one woman’s nearly two decades in the New York City restaurant scene, including her time working with Joe Bastianich, and what happens when your job consumes your life.
By day, Kim Reed was a social worker to the homebound elderly in Brooklyn Heights. By night, she scrambled into Manhattan to hostess at Babbo, where even the Pope would have had trouble scoring a reservation, and A-list celebrities squeezed through the jam-packed entryway like everyone else. Despite her whirlwind fifteen-hour workdays, Kim remained up to her eyeballs in grad school debt. Her training—problem solving, crisis intervention, dealing with unpredictable people and random situations—made her the ideal assistant for the volatile Joe Bastianich, a hard-partying, “What's next?” food and wine entrepreneur. He rose to fame in Italy as a TV star while Kim planned parties, fielded calls, and negotiated deals from two phones on the go.
Decadent food, summers in Milan, and a reservation racket that paid in designer bags and champagne were fun only inasmuch as they filled the void left by being always on call and on edge. In a blink, the years passed, and one day Kim looked up and realized that everything she wanted beyond her job—friends, a relationship, a family, a weekend without twenty ominous emails dropping into her inbox—was out of reach. Workhorse is a deep-dive into coming of age in the chaos of New York City’s foodie craze and an all-too-relatable look at what happens when your job takes over your identity, and when a scandal upends your understanding of where you work and what you do.. After spending years making the impossible possible for someone else, Kim realized she had to do the same for herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reed debuts with an exhilarating if perplexing account of her years working for Joe Bastianich and Mario Batali's famed restaurant empire. She started as a hostess at their New York City hot spot, Babbo, in 2005 while earning a master's in social work, and later served as Bastianich's beleaguered assistant, staying with the B&B Hospitality Group for more than a decade. Reed describes a Devil Wears Prada–esque world where she owed thousands in student loans but reveled in gifts of $600 face cream and jewelry. Grim work responsibilities were mitigated by crushes on various people, and Bastianich is painted as a cheapskate with the attention span of a hummingbird, but there's surprisingly little talk of food and wine. The book's saucy tone shifts when Reed addresses the sexual harassment allegations that forced Batali to leave the company in 2017. Her horror as men leapt to B&B's defense lends resonance to her experience in a way that her earlier attempts to analyze a job that allowed her to sit "squarely in the fray of someone else's life" never quite do. While it offers a juicy behind-the-scenes look at the high life, it's difficult not to see this as a dark morality tale.
