Kim Reed was helping homebound elderly patients as a social worker in the early 2000s when she picked up a part-time hostess job at Babbo, the Greenwich Village restaurant at the center of what was Mario Batali’s restaurant empire. She created the nightly seating chart, which meant juggling requests from celebrities as well as from friends of Batali and his business partner, Joe Bastianich. It turned into a full-time, all-consuming job, first at Babbo and then at Del Posto as Bastianich’s executive assistant. She left the company after Batali was accused of sexual misconduct by several women in 2017. (In 2021, Batali, Bastianich, and their management company settled a lawsuit filed by the State of New York and agreed to pay $600,000 for "fostering a hostile work environment that permitted a sexualized culture of misconduct and harassment at their restaurants in New York City.")
Reed’s memoir, Workhorse: My Sublime and Absurd Years in New York City’s Restaurant Scene, describes what it was like to be at the company when the scandal broke, and some of its most fascinating parts are her behind-the scenes accounts of the crumbling of the Batali–Bastianch partnership.
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