num_pages: 288
description: A razor-sharp look at one womans nearly two decades in the New York City restaurant scene including her time working with Joe Bastianich and what happens when your job consumes your life.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 trainingproblem solving crisis intervention dealing with unpredictable people and random situationsmade 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 jobfriends a relationship a family a weekend without twenty ominous emails dropping into her inboxwas out of reach. Workhorse is a deep-dive into coming of age in the chaos of New York Citys 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.
language: English
title: Workhorse: My Sublime and Absurd Years in New York City's Restaurant Scene
publisher: Hachette Books