USA TODAY International Edition
‘Sweetbitter’: A taste of 2000s restaurant culture
NEW YORK – Stephanie Danler can barely move as she watches a young stuntwoman, arms full of plates and glasses, hurl herself down the stairs. “Cut!” the director yells after the deafening crash, which will be a pivotal scene in Starz’s restaurant comedy/drama Sweetbitter (Sunday, 8 ET/PT), adapted from Danler’s best-selling novel.
Danler is sitting in a director’s chair on set at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios, a corner of which has been transformed into a restaurant, looking thrilled as the room breaks into applause and the stuntwoman carefully picks herself up from the wreckage.
“That looked so good,” she exhales. The character falling down the steps is Tess, the show’s wide-eyed, 22-year-old protagonist, who arrives in New York City circa 2006, starts working in a fine-dining restaurant and tumbles, physically and metaphorically, through the sordid world of the food industry.
Sweetbitter was an out-of-the-gate success when it was published in 2016, debuting at No. 32 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list, and was hailed as “the Kitchen Confidential of our time” by chef Gabrielle Hamilton, a reference to Anthony Bourdain’s groundbreaking 2000 memoir.
Then last year, Danler brought the series to Starz as its creator and executive producer, teaming up with showrunner Stuart Zicherman.
“What I love so much about falling down the stairs is that it comes at a moment when you think you’ve at least mastered the basics, and to fall as an adult is one of the most humbling experiences, and it’s so confusing,” Danler says about the scene.
“And it’s at a point when (Tess) can do her job really well, and it takes her immediately back down to zero.”
“One of the first things we did in the writers room, Day 1, was ask everyone,
‘What are the moments in the book you want to see in Season 1?’ ” Zicherman says, running through the room’s other favorite moments from the book. “Simone’s apartment, shift drinks, family meal, the oysters.”
These and many more of the book’s evocative images made the cut for the first six-episode season, which spans the first two weeks of Tess’ training at the restaurant.
Bringing Tess’ struggles to life was a intimidating for Ella Purnell, the 21year-old British actress who plays her.
“I was super-overwhelmed. It happened really fast, and I honestly felt so under-qualified for the job,” Purnell says.
“(Danler) really calmed me down, and said two things that really stuck with me, which were, ‘I want you to use your own experiences.’ Which immediately loosened the pressure,” she says.
Sweetbitter arrives amid a climate of Me Too, which has exposed the sexist inner workings of both Hollywood and the food industry.
The show’s first season scratches the surface of the complicated sexual politics that play out in the book.
“The book came out before this movement, and displays the full spectrum of sexual politics, from consensual flirtation to drunken hookups to outright abuses of power to micro-aggressions of sexism,” Danler says.
“We didn’t have to change anything, we didn’t have to implant anything, just in mirroring the reality of 2006 we are tackling these subjects.”