A subtle sense of melancholy hangs over these men and women. They’re happy to be where they are; in fact, they feel chosen. But they’re nearly all here because of other dreams that were thwarted. They’re failed poets or academics. Tess had hoped to be a photographer.

“Sweetbitter” is the story of Tess’s sentimental education. We don’t learn much about her past. But in Manhattan we watch her — she is vulnerable but rarely weak — pour herself full with books and art and music, and blossom like a daisy. Mostly she fills herself with lovely things to eat and drink.

Tess isn’t a hipster (“I cared too much about the wrong things”). And Ms. Danler isn’t another Anthony Bourdain manqué, delivering a caustic exposé. She takes the reader by the hand as Tess learns dozens of lessons, from distinguishing among varieties of oysters, types of winter lettuce and appellations of Burgundy to opening wine properly to appreciating a pig’s head terrine.

Tess knows she will, at some point, want more than this. But for now this punishing life feels like ravishment. When a college acquaintance comes into the restaurant one night and condescends to her, only politeness prevents her from speaking aloud: “I chose this life because it’s a constant assault of color and taste and light and it’s raw and ugly and fast and it’s mine. And you’ll never understand. Until you live it, you don’t know.”

This novel, which reads a bit like a food world version of Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Prep,” gets off to a bad start. You notice that its four sections are named after the seasons, as if they were George Winston albums. At the beginning there are gimmicky interpolated sections about things like the nature of sweet versus sour. You fear you may be headed into a genre fiction tunnel of love.

Those fears are quickly dispelled. Ms. Danler is a gifted commenter (chilly autumn air in Manhattan “tasted of steel knives and filtered water”) on many things, class especially. An awareness of privilege runs through this novel like a tendon. “If you’re good at this job,” she asks, “what exactly are you good at?”

“Sweetbitter” grows darker than you might expect, in terms of where Tess’s desires lead her. It’s a book about hunger of every variety, even the sort that can disturb you and make you sometimes ask yourself, as does Tess, “Was I a monster or was this what it felt like to be a person?”