“…the wages were decent, the customers wore suits, and the tips were sometimes obscene.”

It’s short, you should read it in full in LitHub. It starts like this:

I’ve never felt as alive as I did that summer. Alive, needed, run off my feet. Every evening we were queued out the door, we had bookings a year in advance. It was the kind of place people of a certain age called hip, while the rest of us rolled our eyes, discreetly, not wanting to jeopardize our tips.

Back then, when the country still thought it was rich, there was always some brash, impossible customer demanding a table from the hostess just as the dinner rush took hold. These arguments added to the atmosphere, the heat, the energy that ripped around the establishment and kept us going six out of seven nights a week.

It’s a welcome bit of reading in the leadup to the new season of The Bear. The story has some subtle but building tension:

It was his kitchen. He could say or do just about anything, though I don’t think I fully understood this until the end.

While the excerpt doesn’t fully pay off, it does make me sure to pick up the book. From the publisher:

When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrown back to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end Dublin restaurant – the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the wild parties after service, the sizzling tension of the kitchens. But Hannah also remembers how the attention from Daniel soon morphed from kindness into something darker.

Now the restaurant is shuttered and Daniel is faced with the reality of a courtroom. His wife Julie is hiding from paparazzi lenses behind the bedroom curtains. Surrounded by the wreckage of the past, Daniel, Julie and Hannah must reconsider what happened at the restaurant. Their three different voices reveal a story of power and complicity, the lies we tell and the courage it takes to face the truth.

Sounds good to me.

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