In reimagining restaurants, everything is possible
Let’s evolve, shall we?
I wonder if any of us fully fathom what the implosion of restaurants during the coronavirus pandemic means for our culture.
From where I sit — to be literal, on an avocado green sofa on the second floor of a townhouse in a moderately affluent urban-residential neighborhood in Dallas — it feels like the world is divided.
Half of it thinks (or dreams or hopes or imagines) that restaurant culture and life as we know it is on its way back. A good many of the people who think this way are my friends and former colleagues who operate restaurants. They need the industry to come back because it is their life and livelihood, and they feel responsible to the many others who rely on them for employment. Many of them have been positively inspiring in the creative ways they have kept their businesses alive and taken care of their employees, and heroic as they fed a community in need.
Others in that half of the world dream or hope or imagine that restaurants are coming back because eating out with friends is their social and cultural life — at least that’s how it looks as I pass by the upscale dining establishments in my neighborhood. These are the people packing the dining rooms and spilling out onto the patios. A couple of the restaurants look like their proprietors are respecting social-distancing regulations inside their establishments; others appear not to care. Routinely I see 6-tops and 8-tops of maskless people seated elbow-to-elbow indoors who probably do not share a household. They appear not at all worried about spreading or contracting the virus, between them, to other diners, or to a restaurant’s staff.
As transmission numbers start to improve and people drop their guard, it seems worth remembering, as an Aug. 6 study from the Center for American Progress reminds us, that bars and indoor dining — where people are not wearing masks because they’re eating and drinking — pose “unique risks of virus transmission.” It points to the JPMorgan Chase analysis of credit card spending that cited in-restaurant purchases as the strongest predictor of increase of COVID-19 cases.
A Centers for Disease Control study published Sept. 11 found that about half of adults who tested positive for COVID-19 had eaten in restaurants in the 14 days prior to being tested. Just because we’re tired of avoiding restaurants does not mean it is now safe to dine indoors.
One day last month, as Dallas was seeing a dramatic and sustained spike in new cases, my son Wylie and I swung by a new Vietnamese spot ten minutes away — we were going to pick up banh mi sandwiches for a quick family Saturday picnic lunch in a neighborhood park. It was a call-ahead pick-up situation, whereby the restaurant was supposed to send someone out to the car with our order, but we couldn’t find parking, and the order was taking longer than anticipated, so Wylie drove around and I went in — and was unsettled by what I found. Yes, the restaurant was technically in compliance with the city’s 50% occupancy regulation, but the back portion of the restaurant was empty and the front part by the windows — which looked like about a third of the space — was crammed with diners.
A different new normal
On the other side of the divide, I have many friends and acquaintances who seem perfectly content not dining in restaurants. These folks know how to cook and enjoy cooking, so they’re not reliant on restaurants for sustenance. Even if they weren’t particularly happy about giving up dining out when lockdown started, they have gotten used to it. They are committed to social distancing, they want to protect themselves and others, and see themselves as responsible members of a community that needs to make adjustments and sacrifices for the good of all.
Not participating in restaurant culture now — even if it is allowed by law — has felt like the most responsible choice to many.
They feel they should support restaurants by ordering take-out, but that often seems more dutiful and utilitarian than pleasurable. They are happy, they say, eating at home, and often happier cooking when they make themselves that eating takeout that often doesn’t travel well and comes in a lot of plastic containers.
And then, stuck in the middle, there are the people employed by the industry — again, many of my friends and acquaintances — who are chefs and line cooks and dishwashers, managers, bussers, bartenders and servers.
For years, the power structure, financial model and work environment of restaurants has been seriously problematic for those who work in them. Here are some of the (pre-Covid) underlying issues:
- Lack of basic worker’s benefits and protections such as health and disability insurance, sick leave and paid vacation for employees — both front of the house (servers, bartenders, bar-backs, hosts, runners, bussers, managers) and back of the house (chefs, line cooks, prep cooks, dishwashers) in many restaurants.
- The razor-thin margins (so well documented it’s by now cliché) owners operate under, which they say (and it’s hard to argue in many cases) make paying benefits impossible if they are to stay open and continue to employ people.
- Inequity between the front of the house and the back of the house, whereby in upscale, chef-driven restaurants those who invent the dishes, cook the food, burn and cut themselves and clean up work longer hours for often considerably less pay than the people who (from the BOH point-of-view) waltz in and serve the food.
- Inequity within the kitchen. Fueled by food TV and much of the rest of food media, our culture’s adulation of celebrity chefs and the image of the chef as artist and visionary has led to a workplace culture whereby one person (the chef) gets all the credit, all the media attention and all the marketing muscle, while many of those who participate not just in the production of the food but also in the creative endeavor of inventing dishes, must stand by and watch someone else — the person in power, their boss — get fawned over (in print or at the table) for those creations. Overlay the historic structure of the restaurant — which emulates an army brigade, with the chef as general who enjoys absolute authority — and things can go badly out of control. Brilliant creative people often have towering egos. When the ego of the chief (chef means “chief” in French) is outsized in a pseudo-military setting, the potential for the culture to become toxic is high. For more, read Tejal Rao’s “Twilight of the Imperial Chef” (New York Times, Aug. 4, 2020). A parallel universe in the food media world sometimes overlaps, as Meghan McCarron explained in her story “The Boundary Pusher,” about the toxic management style of ex-Lucky Peach and Los Angeles Times Food editor Peter Meehan (Eater, Aug. 21, 2020).
- In addition to those famously razor-thin margins, owners around the country have also been faced, during the last five years, with skilled-labor shortages, affecting their ability to staff both the front of house and back of house. Rising wages as a result of the shortages (yep, supply and demand) adds even greater pressure, making it harder and harder for operators to thrive.
- The sexual harassment, racism and other abuse that often results from an inequitable power structure and reliance on tips (in the worst case) and the often demeaning treatment of servers by patrons and sometimes by management has made working in restaurants intolerable for some. Many have no other option — service jobs are the jobs most readily available. Read Nikki Ervice’s Salon piece from late July, “I’m not going back to work in restaurants — but only because I have a choice.”
The current situation
That was the situation pre-Covid. There have been noble attempts to address inequities — the most highly visible of which was Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group’s move to a “hospitality included” model at it New York restaurants, whereby a gratuity and a fee to finance health care was built into the price of each dish. That’s over as of July.
Adding to the already very serious pressure on restaurants and their staffs from so many angles, the coronavirus blow has been devastating.
In many cities, restrictions have been lifted — and in many (including mine), that has led to spikes in coronavirus transmission and deaths. Restaurants have been hit very hard by the disease itself (on top of everything else), and those who have gone back to work in restaurants are very much at risk — whether from working in close quarters with others in poorly ventilated kitchens, or being breathed on or even yelled at by mask-less diners who want to be treated royally as they always were.
The cultural evolution that began unfolding some years ago and that includes LGBTQ rights, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and other important equality movements has, I think for many, made what we are accustomed to celebrating as hospitality look more and more like servitude. Do we want to go back and participate in that as “guests”? How much would it need to change for those of us with a conscience to feel comfortable with it?
The obliteration of the monolithic chef culture we have erected over the last four decades is crashing down around us as well, as New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells demonstrated in the story he published last month, “Behind the Cancellation of James Beard Awards, Worries about Chefs’ Behavior and No Black Winners.”
Do we want to start putting that broken structure structure back together the way it was? I think not; we have a unique opportunity to reinvent restauration in a way that’s more humane and sustainable. My friend Besha Rodell, who was interrupted in March as she began her around-the-world reporting for her second annual joint Travel + Leisure/Food & Wine “World’s Best Restaurants” story, interviewed last year’s winners about the future. “No one I spoke to longed for things to return to normal in the restaurant industry,” she wrote, “ — the normal of low wages and job insecurity and abusive power structures. Normal is no longer good enough.”
So of course the question is what should a restaurant look like, going forward, and how can it look, and how might it be reimagined? How do we get people who have made their livelihoods in that industry employed once again, and in a way that’s fair and equitable?
We as a society are going to have to get very creative — more creative than figuring out how to package that top-of-the-PMIX entree in a take-out box. Some people will probably need or insist on or want conventional restaurants in which to conduct their social lives, and so — until something replaces them entirely — they’ll continue to exist.
But I think conventional restaurants will be just one part of a much more varied — and evolved — dining landscape. The evolution will be sped up by the destruction of the industry during the pandemic, and I think it will be very interesting. Alicia Kennedy, the Puerto Rico-based writer whose superb newsletter here on Substack is a must-read, raised some interesting ideas in July in “On Restaurants: and the death of the chef:”
“So many alternative kinds of food businesses are never considered for awards or investments. They don’t fit into the chef-auteur framework, and in some cases have no desire to do so — community farms with food stalls, roving trucks, collaborative projects, temporary projects, or family restaurants where three different cooks take turns in the kitchen, depending on their child care schedules.”
That last bit brought to mind Flavors from Afar, which opened in L.A.’s Little Ethiopia neighborhood a week or so after lockdown started (March 21), and which Esther Tseng reviewed recently in Food52 (“The LA Restaurant Helmed by Home Cooks from Around the World,” Aug. 20, 2020).
A revolving restaurant featuring home cooking from around the world is super appealing. So is the idea, spotted by Kennedy on Twitter, of “collectively owned restaurants, perhaps with connections to farms.” Restaurants that blur the line between hospitality and retail will be one way to go (like Jeanne A in Paris); another is conceiving a restaurant as a flexible space with alternative day uses, such as co-working.
I can imagine a restaurant helmed by a team of creative cooks, each of whom is responsible for a certain number of dishes, and each cook engages directly with the diner, delivering dishes, talking about them. Maybe it doesn’t feel so formal, and diners pick up their own flatware and water glasses. Maybe it’s even a co-op, with members required to buss tables once a month, or work the door, or print menus, or serve each other.
Anything is possible. And I believe in evolution. Obviously this is a conversation to be continued.
🐞
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on August 27, 2020 on Substack.
