Workhorse (ePub)

A real-life Sweetbitter: a razor-sharp look at one woman's nearly two decades in the New York City restaurant scene, including as the assistant to famed restaurateur Joe Bastianich, owner of Babbo and partner of Eataly, and what happens when your job consumes your life.

During the day, Kim Reed was a social worker to the homebound elderly in Brooklyn Heights. At night, she'd scramble into Manhattan to hostess at Babbo, where even the Pope would have trouble scoring a reservation, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Ryan Reynolds squeezed through the jam-packed entryway like everyone else. Despite her whirlwind fifteen-hour days, Kim remained up to her eyeballs in grad school debt. Her training-problem solving, crisis intervention work, 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 hobnobbing with the rich and sometimes-famous were fun only inasmuch as they filled the void left by being always on call and on edge. With no life outside her job, Kim was staring down a future alone, without building the family she craved. 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. If she could make the impossible possible for someone else, Kim realized, she needed to do the same for herself.