Some years ago, a friend of mine worked in the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City, under a chef whose name, if you follow food closely, you probably know. She lasted about a year, and though the experience was invaluable, she described the environment as abysmal: long hours, low pay, and a downright oppressive atmosphere (imagine if every day at the office looked like a scene from the movie “Burnt”).

Like show business, Wall Street, the labs of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, and Capitol Hill, the NYC food scene is a high-stress, high-powered magnet for ambitious young people. It attracted author Jessica Tom, a food blogger who has worked in the restaurant industry, and it also draws in Tia Monroe, the protagonist and narrator of Food Whore, Tom’s first novel.

Tia, recently graduated from Yale, comes to NYC to pursue a career in food, and especially a coveted internship with legendary food writer Helen Lansky. The internship falls through but is replaced with an even more intriguing opportunity. Michael Saltz, premier restaurant critic for the New York Times, approaches Tia with a secret: He has lost his sense of taste and needs her to ghostwrite his reviews. Tia takes on a life of high-rolling deception, one that becomes more difficult to sustain when she and Saltz plan to review Bakushan, whose young, handsome chef, Pascal Fox, takes a romantic interest in Tia.

Tom is a talented writer, and Food Whore is a page-turner that reads quickly. Not surprisingly, the novel is at its best when it focuses on food: The descriptions of dish presentations, tastes, and textures are of the caliber you’d read in a top restaurant review. Some of the most memorable scenes describe aspects of the restaurant business, personalizing them through Tia’s experience: from a pre-dinner menu tasting for the staff at a high-end restaurant, to the process of putting together a restaurant review, to the fallout when a restaurant gets a bad review, the details are fascinating and feel realistic.

The author’s background makes it easier to suspend disbelief, though sometimes I wasn’t able to make the leap (for instance, believing that a newspaper restaurant critic would have an unlimited expense account at Bergdorf Goodman, or that two NYU grad students might breezily decide to dine that night at one of New York’s best restaurants).

Some of the characters are quite well drawn. Tia’s hapless but harmless boyfriend, Elliott, has just enough detail to make him real without making him too sympathetic. And, while some might argue that Michael Saltz should have been given more nuance — after all, fate has subjected him to a cruel irony — I thought he was perfect: slimy and unpleasant from the get-go.

Novels like this one tend to depend heavily on their protagonists. Tia is an ambitious young woman who loves food and has a talent for writing about it, but she’s also immature, superficial, shortsighted, self-centered, and naïve. None of this is unusual — she’s in her early 20s, after all — or bad for a character; indeed, these traits give her plenty of room to grow.

But when combined with the seemingly inevitable choice of first-person point of view, the result is a lack of narrative distance that makes it difficult for a reader to see anything bigger in what happens to Tia than what Tia sees herself.

And Tia doesn’t see much. For instance, when Tia meets Pascal, she, and thus the novel, switches from being about her career to being about relationships, and doesn’t switch back until near the end.

As another example, several characters use Tia for their own purposes, but since Tia isn’t sophisticated enough to figure it out for herself, or only belatedly begins to, the author resorts to several admission/confession/explanation scenes of a type that would not be out of place at the end of an episode of “Scooby-Doo.” Finally, it’s not clear what Tia learns from her misadventures, and the ending is so pat that I finished the book wondering if she’d learned much at all.

But this criticism is a shortcoming of many novels marketed a particular way, not just Food Whore. While this one is geared to a different demographic than mine (hint: somewhat younger and much more female), I agreed to review it because the premise is so intriguing.

It doesn’t deliver as a deep exploration of the ethics of career and ambition, but Food Whore is a fun and suspenseful introduction to the brutal yet elegant NYC food scene from an author who knows of what she writes. And if Tia Monroe isn’t the most reliable guide out there, her flaws are no worse than those of many real-life celebrity chefs.

Josh Trapani is working on a novel about another ambitious young woman, this one a scientist who’s forced to make a difficult career choice. He’s the former managing editor of the Independent.