Check, Please

It's Me, Hi, I'm the Problem It's Me (Taylor Swift is not my cup of tea, but when the words are right, the words are right)

It took a handsome, charming, white storyteller chef who loved drugs and went to Vassar to pique America’s interest in restaurants and food. Anthony Bourdain’s 1999 New Yorker essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” led to his 2000 book “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly”. People who had never stepped foot in a professional kitchen felt some sense of authority over the lives of the people who actually worked in them as Bourdain exalted the unsavory side of kitchens that drew him in. 

For many folks, their introduction to Bourdain was “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown” on CNN, where the chef evolved into the penultimate traveller—witty with a critical eye, no bullshit, insightful and respectful to the places and people he met. His influence extended past his initial blend of snark and bravado to include humanity, empathy and warmth for host and places often unseen on TV in the US. Bourdain was cool in a seemingly effortless way, a characteristic this country values so deeply. 

We’d like to think restaurant kitchen has evolved since “Kitchen Confidential”, 2000, to justify the increasing attention, money and words dedicated to food and restaurants. If we really cared about food, we would care about all the workers, in the entire supply chain; their pay and conditions, farmers, food waste, treatment of animals, and whether people have enough to eat before we made another reservation.  

The stakes are high in restaurants. Our naivety is exhausting. I’m not forgiving the wrongdoers, but we need to see how our own appetites, our consumption, fuels these problems. We collect restaurants like feathers in our caps of relevance, places you must go to to be a part of the scene. Look at how the press works now—-there are top 10 lists in the food magazines and the New York Times that all come out at the same time. We keep assuming that everyone is an upstanding employer, otherwise why would respected news sources write about them? 

There’s a lot of money involved in restaurants, especially in New York where real estate is out of control. Reputations are on the line. If you do one well, another world opens for you, and that’s actually how you make money. If you fuck it up, well, if you’re a white guy you’re fine. Everybody else, see you later.

And then there’s us, a mercurial public that can’t get enough. We want it all, the romantic intensity, a table at 8 pm on a Saturday, perfect service, sublime food, fair wages for the staff, health insurance and paid vacation time. We are going to feel your restaurant so hard, it’s giving us life, we’ve thriving here, we’re in love with you, we are completely obsessed. Until we are not.

We want to believe restaurants are fair and fun places to work, then we’re doing something good by going to them. We gasp every time an attractive, nice chef is indicted by their staff for abusive work environments. We can’t believe a chef is cruel, yet we love their intensity and tunnel-vision. We keep thinking that rich people who look good are not capable of bad things. So many exposes over the past few years (The Willow Inn, Momofuku, Sqirl, Mission Chinese, Eleven Madison Park, Blue Hill, Noma) list problems like low wages, physical and emotional abuse, reliance on unpaid labor to such a consistent point that these practices seem the standard rather than the exception. 

Stop giving chefs and owners the benefit of the doubt. The centuries of shitty practices, they hand down. New people learn from old people and implement the same systems because that has worked before, they are proven. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for the next person.

I have never been treated so poorly as I have in the name of hospitality. I’ve been yelled at, overworked, undervalued, always underpaid, demeaned, sexually harassed, physically ground down on a daily basis, made to be invisible, swallowed myself as a person, burdened with the emotional labor of keeping narcissists happy, burned, cut, in pain, underestimated, shunned, used for but also hated for being talented and smart.

Restaurants don’t work in a multitude of ways. This fact creates a flourishing environment for bad practices. Margins are incredibly slim with perishable product and a clientele who likes to eat at the same time. The Department of Health can come whenever they want for inspection during service, and guess what, the fines have tripled.

How can we expect change in the industry but use the same standards to judge and review restaurants? How can any publication rank a restaurant without knowing how they pay and treat their workers? What if the product, the plate of food in front of you, is different because people are paid more, have health insurance and vacation time along with the sick leave mandated by law? 

If dining out costs more because workers are prioritized, with livable wages (very different than minimum), health insurance, paid time off and we can’t afford to eat out as often, do we want it? 

The workers at Lodi, a Mattos Hospitality restaurant that was the one of the first of the Rockefeller Center revitalization, are having a union vote February 27th and February 28th, today and tomorrow. Tishman Speyer, the real estate firm that owns Rockefeller Center, decided to make Rockefeller Center a dining destination, not just for tourist but for New Yorkers. They’ve attracted some of the best independent restaurants in the city, offering reduced rents and contributing or completely covering construction costs, depending on the restaurant.

Their January 25 letter to Mattos Hospitality lists their broad demands, including wage increases and improved benefits (some people make $18/hour, a martini is $22), wage transparency for tipped workers, consistent scheduling with advance notice, adequate staffing and training and provision of work tools. They also site that “the fruits of our joint labor are ultimately at the disposal of a handful of ultra-wealthy speculators and rent-collectors, including direct investors, interest-collecting bankers, and Tishman Speyer, the landlord/investor that owns Rockefeller Center, with $56.8 billion in assets under management in 2020.”

I don’t think Prometheus gave fire to man so he could be treated terribly by his employer

“The hospitality industry is one of the largest employers in this country,” a man who runs a concierge company said to me last week. Whenever I hear someone say this, I don’t hear a fact, I hear an excuse. I hear a get out of jail free card for owners because they’re so kind they had an idea so we can have jobs. It’s time to right this course before we get in any deeper. We’ve ignored workers’ rights for a really long time in this country, the past few years have seen an uptick in actions.

I love restaurants, but they’re fucked-up places. Maybe I love restaurants because they are fucked-up places. Or maybe I love restaurants because I’m fucked-up. A lot of people work hard for little tangible return. They make no sense on paper. You will always work hard in a restaurant. Luckily, a lot of people like to work hard. They should be treated with respect and compensated accordingly. For us, the people who eat in restaurants, we have to understand that change changes things. After a long period of growth and attention in food, investment and care with ingredients and many new ideas, it’s time for workers to be prioritized. Otherwise, it’s all just talk.