“Uncorking Secrets: How Hannah Selinger’s ‘Cellar Rat’ Takes You on a Thrilling Journey Through Wine and Intrigue”
One of the book’s most poignant chapters, chapter 5 “Fourplay,” is also one of Cellar Rat’s most chilling. It was from this point on that I read the book with my heart in my throat. Selinger recounts in intimate detail a scene of unwanted sex with Johnny Iuzzini, then the pastry chef at four-star restaurant Jean-Georges when he was regarded as an-industry wunderkind.
Whether Selinger was cognizant of it at the time or if she gleaned this insight with retrospection, she writes “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.”
