Phoebe Damrosch started life in a lamp-lit cabin on a mountaintop. She was named Robin, then Laurel, and finally christened Phoebe, after a bird nesting in the rafters. The phoebe is a plain brown bird that lives on flies.

At age nine, she moved with her parents to Haiti where she attended a tiny international schoolhouse. There were few children her age, so she spent most of her time reading and eavesdropping on the adults. The latter skill has proven more useful than fluency in Haitian Kreyol.

On her return to the States, she took up the viola and was considering a career in music, until she realized that she could, conceivably, never read another book. She panicked, cancelled her auditions, and went to college instead. Today her viola, Leonard, he has a broken string and lives in the closet.

After attending Barnard College and enrolling in an MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, Phoebe worked as a nanny/role model, walked dogs, fed cats, proofread, helped organize a documentary film tour of women’s prisons, and wrote the web content for a Filipino dating agency. A job as a busboy at a cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn led to a position at a slightly swankier place in midtown Manhattan and eventually to opening the highly anticipated Per Se in the Time Warner Center.

At some point, amid the decanting and truffle-shaving at Per Se, Phoebe realized that she was in the middle of a book-worthy story. Much had been written about chefs and kitchens, but very little about the intrigue of service, let alone in the prestigious dining rooms of New York. After eighteen months, Phoebe moved into her sommelier boyfriend’s 150-square-foot studio and began working on a book.

The two have since moved to Brooklyn where they live with their French bulldog, Guinness, and son, Finnegan. Fittingly, Finn was born in a kitchen, a fact which his parents plan to use against him when pushing vegetables.

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