This recent article in Grub Street asks: “Can Restaurants Be Fixed From the Inside?” It reports on some of the most visible manifestations of a recent bout of soul searching in the restaurant industry, during which the industry has started to question its somewhat unenlightened treatment of its constituent workers.
It put me in mind of a conversation I had with a friend I’ll call S, back in February. S is a chef/owner who operates in a city that’s not SF/NY/Chicago, and he’s been in rehab for just about anything you can go to rehab for, but he did so before you were supposed to hold a press conference to announce it.
When he opened his current (and for now his only) restaurant in 2016, he did so believing that he had a duty to watch out for his staff’s emotional and mental health, as well as paying them decently and developing them as professionals. In his locale, this was absolutely unheard of — he’s in a place where the ideas of mental and emotional health are given short shrift anyway.
He didn’t have the space or the money to build either a meditation garden or a mindfulness room in his restaurant (as some of the celebrity chefs in the Grub Street piece are doing), but he could make time for the staff to talk. Pre-service meetings lasted an hour (industry standard is much shorter). Post-shift meetings thirty minutes (most restaurants don’t do one at all). They ran two services a day, so the team spent 3 hours a day just talking to each other. This was also absolutely unheard of.
As S told it, “We’d go round the circle and talk about how everyone was feeling. At first, no one took this seriously. They’d go, ‘oh, I’m feeling tired,’ ‘I’m feeling sleepy,’ and I’d be there talking about how I was worried about my dad’s health or how something that happened that day made me think about this place where I used to live, and everyone would be looking at me like ‘what the fuck kind of pre-service is this?’ We kept this up for like two months before finally one of our cooks said that he was feeling bad today because he’d argued with his mum last night. And then people finally started talking.”
“I told myself that I’d just keep the pre-services going no matter how long it took, and thank god it was only two months. Once that first cook opened up, people would start talking about this thing or that thing that we’d done or said in service and how it made them feel. They’d talk about how they were feeling when they came in to work that day and how it was affecting them. We started to hear about breakups and family problems and school problems and all these things that were making it harder for them to do their jobs, and sometimes people would talk about how they were feeling great or how this one guest had said something that made their day. For all of these guys, this was the first time they ever had an employer who gave half a fuck about how they were doing, who they were, that they were alive outside of work. People would come and thank me for doing these. Sometimes people would start crying. It just felt like, ‘shit, maybe now we’re getting somewhere.’”
“And then people started leaving. It took a year, maybe 9 months. But people started leaving and we had to hire and every time you hire you start from ground zero again and it takes the guy 3 bloody months to say anything but ‘I’m tired.’ And the more the new people say ‘I’m tired’ the more the old hands start asking what the fuck we’re doing all this for, because apparently they don’t remember when this was the greatest thing an employer had ever done for them. And then you get to this tipping point and suddenly there are more people going ‘I feel tired’ or ‘I feel sleepy’ than are actually talking and then what do you do? There are always going to be the people who aren’t going to come and engage, the really tough nuts, like this one guy who just came with this attitude like ‘fuck you, I don’t need to fucking talk about my feelings here, I’m just here to cook’ for month and months. You can’t fire the guy just because he won’t talk.”
I put it to S that he might have seen less turnover if he paid more.
“I already get shit from everyone up and down this street because we do pay more than they do! I’m already like 30% above market here, and if I offered more people would just think ‘what’s so wrong that this guy has to pay so much?’ And even what we pay is barely enough for people to live on, so you think about what market wages are.”
“The other problem is the kind of food we make. You know my menu, it’s just humble, everyday food, it’s not like Michelin star fine dining or whatever, and people basically think it’s worthless, and that they’re worthless if this is what they’re cooking. It’s hard on people mentally, and we’re already talking about line cooks here, who aren’t held in high esteem anyway, and then you tell people that you basically make breakfast and sandwiches* and then you really feel like the lowest of the low, no matter how much skill or dedication it actually takes. And none of these guys grew up with the mental tools for dealing with this. Many of them grew up not ever having any real expectation of a future, so when they come here there’s a real conflict between ‘this place is different from any other place I’ve ever worked’ and ‘shit, I’m basically like making diner food, maybe everyone was right that this is all I’m worth’ and that’s hard to take.”
“One time we had a guy come in here to stage. He was actually the chef de cuisine at one of the hotel restaurants around here, and he answered an ad we posted for sous chef because the salary was so high. He had no intention of taking the job, and he just told me to my face, ‘I wanted to see what kind of joker was offering this much for a sous chef to come and make sandwiches!’”
“So yeah, turnover. And yeah, it gets harder and harder to do this each time. And the longer people are here, the more time we put into getting them to a place where they start to view this workplace the way we hope they will… when they leave it’s a harder and harder kick in the balls.”
I found it conspicuous only one person quoted in the Grub Street piece mentioned health insurance, or paying a living instead of a minimum wage, or doing anything to make it possible for their cooks and dishwashers to work one job instead of three. I have to think these basic steps will do more to curb the substance and emotional abuse than any number of meditation sessions. And unlike empathy workshops, these aren’t solutions that can just happen “from the Inside.” For the most part, restaurateurs don’t actively want to pay their workers nothing and make their lives harder and more stressful than they already are. It’s just that the industry’s hands are tied unless people pay more for their food, and it’s a bit of a leap to assume that most people even can. No amount of mindfulness training for the staff will change this. Teaching hospitality professionals to cope with stress is great — but I have to think enabling them to lead less marginal lives is better.
* I have changed the kind of food that S’s restaurant serves, but the spirit remains. Humble, simple, generally not thought to be worth a skilled cook’s time and care.
This is Faith, suitably impressed by a beautifully over-engineered Nashville Hot Chicken sandwich from Hot Chix Boston.
I’ve never had Nashville style chicken in a sandwich, and I think I see why. A good version has layers of heat, while a mediocre one is just painful, and it seems like putting anything in your mouth with the chicken overshadows the complexity the chicken has on its own. This chicken was superlative on its own. In the sandwich, it was a really spicy chicken sandwich.
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. And as always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
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best,
tw
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