I was working at Jean-Georges, the petite and bourgeois restaurant tucked into Trump’s building on Columbus Circle, just off Central Park, where the sounds and smells of New York faded into the austere dining room. It was a room of extravagances small and large.
There’s no pleasure in a four-star dining room, no joviality. You can’t be jocular with your fellow servers. There’s no room for error. A server is not permitted to do the following: wear colored nail polish; cross hands in front of the body; slouch; speak on the floor; carry a glass from the bar to the table without a tray; show visible tattoos; wear hair in an inappropriate manner (this can be at the discretion of a manager); touch a glass by any part except the stem; pour wine in the incorrect order; spill; laugh.
One of the more arresting displays took place when Philippe Vongerichten, the restaurant’s general manager and brother of its executive chef, came through with a pineapple. There, in the gray light, Philippe would pierce the end of the fruit with two forks and hoist it into the air, carving ravines into its sides before setting it ablaze with kirsch.
This was the kind of performative act that looked better than it tasted. It was, after all, just a very expensive pineapple, and that’s how I felt about most of the food at the restaurant: it was pretty, if a little uninteresting.
I had landed a two-week stage as a sommelier, and hoped the job would lead to a full-time gig at the group’s downtown restaurant, Perry St, a cooler, more chic spot that very much felt like a place where I would fit in. But here, the mood was stodgy. In the dining room: no leaning. Business was conducted at a whisper. If a guest got up to use the restroom, one did not fold a napkin in absentia, as was protocol in nearly every other restaurant in fine dining. Instead, that napkin was removed. This dirty thing! A new one appeared, folded beside the plate, as if by magic, before the guest re-emerged.
There is a difference between restaurants that receive two or three stars from the New York Times and restaurants that receive four. At restaurants that receive four, like Jean-Georges, waiting tables is a career because the money allows it. The job was demanding, but it offered rewards in return. This was not an entry-level restaurant job, and people in the industry understood the level of discipline and professionalism required. If you’re used to working in fine dining, like I was, the transition to top-tier can be brutal.
But if you love service – or are, as I was, addicted to the inherent charms of restaurants – you couldn’t help but love this one, with its old school customs and extreme technique. To enter the dining room was to enter another world, which is, at its core, what fine dining is all about: transportive experience. To be in there, among the most expensive wines in the world, with the carts and tableside plating, the French-style service and the whisper-quiet, was to be in elite company.
Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the critically acclaimed Alsatian chef responsible for the restaurant, was himself a perfectionist. Had I ever seen another place like this, where food was produced, yes, but where, in truth, there was no grimy proof of it, no accidental leak of ketchup, no grease trap overflowing on occasion, no tipping over of a tray or sticky floor that betrayed months – if not years – of old food? There was no cacophony, no clang of pots, no shouting or anger or indication of the stress that comes when the printer is operating on overdrive.
For all its formality, Jean-Georges set its pastry chef, Johnny Iuzzini, loose in the final course. The Dover sole was still deboned, plated and sauced tableside. But the dessert? It flew off in a million directions, a weird symphony of flavor and colors.
It was always a surprise when it was plated on a square vessel with four quadrants, the most avant-garde part of the meal. Sometimes these quadrants were ingredient-themed, and other times they were seasonally inspired. Consider a rumination on rhubarb: in one quadrant, a birch beer soft-serve ice cream, served in a tiny glass with carbonated strawberry-rhubarb consommé. In another, a rhubarb panna cotta with dried rhubarb powder. Then, a jade green matcha cake, surrounded by hibiscus and red wine–poached rhubarb. Finally, an orb of crispy rhubarb cheesecake, topped with a dollop of raspberry puree.
Guests lost their minds over these desserts. New York Magazine’s profile fawned over the chef, who admitted to such an aggressive sugar addiction that, by 2003, he had worn down his teeth and was replacing his veneers every year; he was only 29 at the time. Unlike the straitlaced servers on the floor, he was slick, with a gelled pompadour, a Ducati and a gig spinning as a DJ downtown.
Johnny Iuzzini began his career at Jean-Georges in 2002 after working under François Payard for several years at Daniel and Café Boulud. A year after beginning at Jean-Georges, Iuzzini won the James Beard award for outstanding pastry chef. Two years later, he would publish his first book, called Dessert FourPlay: Sweet Quartets from a Four-Star Pastry Chef. That was one year after I met him in the basement of the restaurant, where he operated a glossy pastry kitchen, as well as a fully refrigerated chocolate locker, where he created the final tastes of the evening: handcrafted chocolates.
On the first or second day of my stage, I had been sent downstairs to meet with him by the director of operations to learn more about the restaurant’s pastry program, down to the bowels of the seemingly endless restaurant.
The prep kitchen, pastry kitchen, chocolate unit, employee dining cafe and lockers constitute an underground maze, never-ending passageways of hidden spaces that hide staff from guests. In the chocolate room, I was meant to learn about the procedure of making the tiny petits fours that go out to guests as the final gift each evening. Instead, in the room so cool that my breath took on the condensed look of smoke, I stood statue-still as Johnny grabbed me from behind. Maybe I didn’t mind.
“Come downtown with me,” he said.
Chocolate must be kept cool because it is such a shapeshifter. Chocolate-making involves rules. It involves process. You have to temper chocolate. If you fail to control chocolate, it will turn chalky. It will lose its texture and sheen, break prematurely, turn grainy. Such a delicate material, chocolate, far more delicate than pastry, or even pastry cream.
That Johnny had chosen chocolate, this most temperamental of ingredients, as his passion project, felt meaningful. Why choose the thing that is hardest, I wondered? It must take a patient person – a person with delicate hands and constitution – to choose to work with something so infinitely fickle. Here was an artist, I thought. Here was someone who had chosen such a difficult medium. And he wanted me to accompany him into his secret, private life, away from the restaurant. How could I possibly decline?
“We have to go separately,” he said. “No one can see us.”
That should have been my first red flag.
All employees at Jean-Georges leave through a separate entrance, so that the guests don’t have to mingle with them; this is another rule of fine dining. When service has ended, and you are in your plain clothes, you must disappear into the night, through a porter’s entrance or side door, a performer who has played the role. No one can see you in this real life of yours, this city life, where you wear jeans and sweaters and carry a backpack or purse.
Outside, it was spring, or maybe early summer. Johnny got on his Ducati, a fast bike that would beat me downtown. I hailed a cab on Central Park West, and headed into the velvet night.
The invitation felt precious, and I felt unworthy.
In his East Village apartment, Johnny talked about his mother, who had died the year before at 56. I would think about this later, from time to time, about what it had meant for him to lose her, about whether it made him a sympathetic character in the wake of my own loss. My own father died at 57 from ALS.
Johnny led me into his bedroom.
There were things that I agreed to and things that I did not agree to. What I agreed to: sex. What I did not agree to: the camera that appeared out of nowhere. There was no permission to grant. Johnny had already started filming. I looked up from the bed and was greeted by the cold, blank stare of a camera, and not of a partner.
I told him to stop. In my head, I thought about the things that I could do, or the things that I could say, about the obvious betrayal. I thought about how disgusting it was, about how I could end up on the internet, about how I could never run for president, and about how ridiculous that thought was, since I had never planned to run for president in the first place.
My brain ran on hyperdrive, firing at a million thoughts a second, and my mouth ran dry. “Stop” came out, a pathetic, one-syllable word. You can feel two things at once, and I did, pulled in two directions, like a dog toy that has been ripped at the seams until it barely exists anymore. Stop. Don’t stop. Stop this, but stay here, with me, because, please, I do not want to be alone.
“If you don’t want your face in it, you can put a pillowcase over your head,” he said.
He didn’t put the camera down. He was staring at me from above, holding the camera in one hand and holding his hair back with another. He wasn’t exactly standing upright; it was more of a kneel. Still, he could have pinned me down if he wanted. I wasn’t free to leave, the position said. This image is mine, the position said.
I didn’t agree to the pillowcase, either. I didn’t want to be a floating sphere, a headless apparition. His foreplay was a woman without a head, appearing in his bed without a face. A bag over my head.
I don’t know why, but I didn’t leave. I felt like I couldn’t somehow, like I was pinned by an invisible hand. Johnny didn’t press the issue of the pillowcase again, but his face twisted up, and the version of him that had been with me until then – the chocolatier who was fun and pleasant and who missed his mom – had vanished.
It didn’t feel like any ancient betrayal, being photographed without consent. It felt like the same thing as always, just another person whom I had trusted who had let me down a little. Johnny was another power imbalance to negotiate, another calculated loss. I often think that I stayed in restaurants because restaurants were the natural place for a person like me, a person who was constantly seeking affection in places where affection was simply unavailable.
The morning after my night with Johnny, I went back to my apartment to change before work. The subway cars, they looked very, very clean, and I felt very, very dirty, a situational crisis that I realized was not exactly my fault – or was it? I had to wonder if I had put myself in a position of vulnerability. It’s not just trauma that walks with you in the haunting moments after a night like this. The true feeling, if I were to pinpoint it, is shame, and the best way to overcome deep shame is to make yourself believe that it was always your idea: the sex, the drinks, that you had agency, that you were the one who wanted it in the first place. Somehow, that feels less shameful than the truth.
At work the next day, I told a server that we had been out at the club together – nothing about the apartment, the sex, the camera, the pillowcase. Later, Johnny pulled me into the chocolate room, seething.
“You weren’t supposed to tell anyone we went out,” he said.
Something about his wrath made me feel even worse. Was it not my fault that I had been treated like garbage by this celebrity chef, after all? I had gone to his apartment of my own volition. I had made the choice to commingle work and pleasure. Johnny had not coerced me or taken advantage of me in any real way. I could have put the pillowcase over my head. It would have made no difference.
There was a fundamental part of me that felt turned upside-down. Was it wrong to be grabbed by a chef during work hours in a chocolate room, even if I liked it? Was it wrong, in the aftermath, for him to have requested my silence and complicity, for him to have issued blame, claiming that if I had said anything that I would be jeopardizing his career? And surely it was wrong for him to have asked me to put a pillowcase over my head, even if it was only some infantile execution of his male fantasy?
The truth – I would learn later – was that Johnny Iuzzini had a long-term girlfriend, and the casualty, in all of this, was me. When he suggested that I put a pillowcase over my head, he really did not want to see my face, the reality of me, the person behind the sex. I was just a girl in a basement who looked good in a uniform. I was just a girl at a bar after a shift. I was just a girl on a couch listening at the right time. I was just a girl whom he could ask to put a bag over her head. I was just a girl.
There were other girls, too. In 2017, four women came forward to say that they had been sexually harassed by Iuzzini at work. It wasn’t just me; it was any girl. Every girl. It was my friend, Tia, whom he had propositioned at her midtown restaurant, even though she was dating his co-worker. It was a woman from work, who claimed that he stuck his tongue down her throat without permission. It was probably women who hadn’t come forward, too, or women like me who were not quite sure if there had been a violation or not, but who had spent years thinking that something about it had felt wrong.
Johnny wasn’t an artist. He was something more twisted, more grotesque. Deep within me, there was a black, hardened tree, the branches of which had been growing almost my entire life, the angry scars of mistreatment. There it was: anger. I was so fucking angry. Angry in the way that women are not permitted to be.
Why be afraid to say it, anyway? Probably because a public figure – that’s who Johnny was – can make your life a living hell if you dare betray your own humanity. Probably because a woman isn’t allowed to be angry if she was a part-willing participant. I should have been thankful for the attention, thankful to be temporarily on the arm of such a hot commodity. He took me downtown, into his weird, little world. That should have been enough for me, but it wasn’t. I should have been grateful, but I wasn’t. Instead, I was seething, a roiling pot, ready to overflow.
Good chocolate, I think, is both bitter and sweet, at least the way that I prefer it. I don’t know whether or not Johnny loved the ingredient for this quality, but it’s what I like about it – that it can be two things at once, that it can straddle the palate and remind us of how high a dessert can climb.
The artistry that people found so obsessive when it came to Johnny – that he could stew over an ingredient and turn it into four composed desserts – is exactly what I find uninteresting. In the end, those desserts didn’t actually taste that good. They were bombastic, and they were visual, and they drew you in. They were tricky and manipulative, the way that restaurants and the people in them can be. But they weren’t the kind of desserts that keep you up at night, pierced with longing.
We never needed those four desserts, not any of us.
Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly, by Hannah Selinger, is out now
