‘Sweetbitter’ Review: Delectable Drama This series, based on the novel of the same name, follows a newcomer to New York and her entrée into the high-end restaurant business. Dorothy Rabinowitz
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sweetbitter-review-delectable-drama-1525383655
The charms of this drama about the world of a New York restaurant run deep and they make themselves felt with startling speed. A tale that begins as this one does, with a 22-year-old leaving her unexciting middle-American town to find a bigger life in the fabled city, can only suggest the beginning of a highly familiar adventure. That will not turn out to be the case here. The adventurer in question, Tess ( Ella Purnell ), will confront a toll taker on the bridge leading to Manhattan, a woman who utters two words—“seven dollars.” The traveler is taken aback—she’s not a girl with money to spare. That seems like a lot to get in, she tells the toll clerk.
“Seven dollars,” the toll collector repeats evenly, with no change of tone. We’ve seen this woman before, and heard this exact tone—she knows her job and it’s not to talk about the expensive tolls.
This briefest of encounters carries the first whiff of the subtleties, the perfectly observed detail, that distinguishes “Sweetbitter,” a six-part series based on the 2016 novel by Stephanie Danler. ( Stuart Zicherman was the executive producer and director.)
The first person of consequence Tess meets in her quest for a job is Howard (an enthralling portrayal by Paul Sparks ), general manager of a renowned Manhattan restaurant. A sophisticated, understated sort, he asks Tess all sorts of unexpected interview questions—the books she reads, what interests her—and he listens seriously to the answers. Howard will turn out to have a more complicated life than expected, but he never loses his status as revered authority figure to his staff—or his capacity to steal almost every scene. Almost, because “Sweetbitter” is remarkably rich in distinctively drawn characters.
The leader of the pack is the elegant Simone (Caitlin FitzGerald), a high-status staff member known for her encyclopedic knowledge of wines and her lack of deference to Howard. She fears no one. And she knows all the do’s and don’ts of a career in restaurants—knowledge she’s willing to dispense to Tess, who soon develops worshipful feelings toward this queenly guide, and for good reason. Tess’s first days in training are pure chaos, rendered captivatingly with a focus on kitchen scenes with staffers screaming food orders, people with plates of hot food racing past one another with terrifying speed.
Tess is invariably in everyone’s way. She grasps too late, one night, that she’s supposed to be cleaning all the salt shakers. Racing to her post, she finds Simone, patiently doing the job herself and wearing a look of supreme satisfaction. Simone is nothing if not a highly complicated woman—one with a certain blood-chilling quality in Ms. FitzGerald’s vivid portrayal. The first thing Tess hears about Simone when she arrives at the restaurant is a terse warning muttered by a staff member: “She’s not your friend.” It’s advice whose soundness can seem dubious one minute and then again not—one of the appeals of the deftly sustained mystery that surrounds this character.
The series is set in 2006—a year, its creators say they chose because it was a time before the arrival of smartphones when life could still be experienced firsthand “in tactile, messy ways.”
Whether thanks to the absence of those phones or not, there’s no missing the ebullience that courses through this splendidly realized drama of ambition, of workplace ties that bind—that brings it roaring spectacularly to life.
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