HOUSE RULES

Literary Restaurant Fiction | Novel
Status: Writing first draft
Setting: New York City
Themes: power, desire, work, hierarchy, social
performance, boundaries, restaurant culture

A literary restaurant novel about power, desire, and the rules people break once they realize who really runs the room.

 When Alice transfers from the bustling Manhattan brasserie Pepper to help manage its candlelit Brooklyn sister restaurant, Clove, she expects a fresh start and her first real shot at management. Clove is intimate, beautiful, and beloved by its regulars—a world of natural wine, tiny plates, and slow, lingering dinners.

But behind the warmth of the dining room is a social hierarchy built on rules no one writes down.

No one understands those rules better than Elie, the magnetic busser who seems to know every regular, every staff secret, and every invisible current moving through the room. As Alice struggles to find her footing, Elie becomes her guide to Clove’s hidden ecosystem—where power rarely belongs to the person with the title.

Set inside the seductive world of New York hospitality, House Rules is a sharp, intimate look at the blurred lines between authority, loyalty, intimacy, and control.

For Readers Who Like:
Restaurant fiction, workplace tension, messy power dynamics,
morally complicated attraction, sharp social observation, Brooklyn
dining rooms, first-person literary voice, and stories where everyone
knows the rules until someone decides they do not apply.