CARE AND FEEDING: A Memoir, by Laurie Woolever

CELLAR RAT: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly, by Hannah Selinger

Our enjoyment of restaurants is matched only by our outrage at what occurs in them. A decade after accusations against the chef Mario Batali ushered in the #MeToo era in the fine dining world, blowing the lid off years of industrywide abusive behavior, two memoirs lift up the kitchen mats and examine the scuzz the Bad Boy Chef Era left underneath.

The first, “Care and Feeding” by Laurie Woolever, is an intimate dispatch from an inside player. Woolever was both Batali’s assistant and, from 2009, Anthony Bourdain’s, until the latter’s death by suicide in 2018. She also worked on books with both men.

The other, “Cellar Rat,” by Hannah Selinger, is a howling account from the periphery. Selinger worked as a server and sommelier at a few marquee restaurants, then, briefly, as a beverage director for another bad boy chef, at David Chang’s Momofuku.

One is a fundamentally kind and generous book; the other, a petty and mean one. Which is which is easily surmised by the titles alone.

“Very few people are curious about the unknown women who prop up the work of important men,” Woolever writes. Since she worked with two of them, it would have been easy for their shadows to stretch over Woolever’s own. But they don’t.