Sean Wilsey, reviewing Service Included by Phoebe Domrosch, in the New York Times Book Review: "Depending on your constitution you will revel or recoil at much of the excess described therein. Perhaps both.
When I read that Per Se staff members can tell you “the names of the cows that produced the milk” for their butter and “run out to the deli around the corner to buy Red Bull on request,” I thought of Thomas Harris’s “Hannibal,” in which a villain taunts children and then, oh the joy, drinks “martinis made with tears.” At Per Se someone could dash across to Central Park, make some playground kids cry into Spiegelau wineglasses — and get names, too!
Refinement is a form of corruption. Sharpening of the palate may well correspond to deeper deadening. Human organs of sense and experience, cut free from anything but their own pleasure, catered to so scrupulously — how can it end in anything other than a spoiled, infantilized, ever-more-demanding state? Damrosch largely elides this. In one scene she describes a regular named “Eve,” a porcelain-skinned woman in her mid-20s (“one of the few guests who have had both lunch and dinner at the restaurant on the same day”). Smitten by the woman’s mystique, Damrosch tells us that “Eve belongs to Fitzgerald.”
Then Eve has lunch and camps out for the afternoon with “two young gentlemen” while Damrosch stands at the exit with chocolates, trying to get them to go. It’s impossible to say anything because “nothing is important enough to interrupt the guest.”
Finally, leaving, Eve puts her hand on Damrosch’s arm, leans close, says, “Don’t be shocked,” and tells her that “apparently the new thing” — actually, this won’t be making it into a family newspaper. But I will say that it is a sexual practice, that it involves a kitchen appliance, and that Caligula himself would have demurred.
I thought: the kind of people who eat at Per Se really should be disturbed."
I think the quote "Eve belongs to Fitzgerald" is telling. It's truly a new gilded age.