A razor-sharp look at one woman's nearly two decades in the New York City restaurant, including her time working with Joe Bastianich, and what happens when your job consumes your life.
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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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 11/09/2021
ISBN: 9780306875106
Pages: 288

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 08/30/2021
Kirkus Reviews 09/15/2021