Newly arrived in New York City and a sponge for all that the city has on offer, Tess finds work in a landmark downtown restaurant that doubles as a de facto clubhouse for the city's cultural movers and shakers. Conducting martini lunches and champagne dinners with daring and precision is a fleet of servers with graduate degrees and art careers just one break short of making it; a psychoanalyst turned manager with a taste for the more nubile female staff; and a tatted up, emotionally unavailable bartender with a penchant for Nietzsche (his karaoke song: 'Born to Run'). As her palate for food, wine and the city expands to include the briniest oysters, the most exotic spices and a few substances of lesser legal provenance, Tess finds herself pulled in by the darker elements of the service industry and New York's ever shifting demimonde.Unfolding in short, lyrical scenes - resembling the fragmented reality of working in a restaurant - Sweetbitter is an arresting, unrelenting and intensely exhilarating portrait of a young woman navigating the distance between tabula rasa and an adulthood that seems forever off the table.