math in the middle, menu at the end
math in the middle, menu at the end
Thanks to everyone who came to the pop-up on Tuesday! We fed 80 people in a 20 seat restaurant, a decent Tuesday. It was great to cook for y’all and to be on the line again.
Thanks also to everyone who wrote in about restaurant math - here’s a mailbag.
First up, from Connor:
I'm a touch confused about one of your calculations, but I'm not familiar with restaurants, so I assume I'm missing something. When you say they turn twice a night 5 days a week, and three turns on 2 nights, I would think that makes for 16 seatings a week rather than 13. What am I missing? Are the turns when the seats are empty or something?
Connor isn’t missing anything. I was. With the assumptions I made the house would actually fill 16 times a week, not 13.
This means that the required check average would actually be $50, not $60. I estimated that my neighborhood restaurant runs an actual check average in the $40-50 range, so if they regularly turn 16 times a week, and if everyone in those 16 turns gets a full dinner (or drinks enough), and if their check average is in fact at the upper bound of my expectations, it should be able to afford to pay its staff a comfortable wage without raising its prices.
The problem, as I said last time, is that this represents the absolute best case scenario. If they do 10% fewer covers per week, or if the ordering patterns result in an average check that’s 10% lower, they would still need to increase their prices to make these numbers work. In short — it’s within the realm of possibility that they don’t need to raise prices to pay staff fairly, but highly unlikely.
Sammy wrote:
On the calculations, two thoughts. First, while I agree with you that $150K is what it actually costs to maintain a household and raise a family in NY, it’s also [twice] the median household income for the region and two and a half times the median household income for the country. So while it may make sense as a top-of-career target, it seems infeasible as an average target for restaurant workers. And it would leapfrog restaurant workers from being badly underpaid even by service industry standards to being one of the better-paid service industries. So I wonder if there’s a math somewhere in the middle between current practice and your calculations.
The living wage calculator suggests that comfortable wage for a single adult living alone is in the region of $72k. If the target seems high it’s probably because the calculator seems to assume that a single adult rents a studio apartment rather than a room in a shared apartment (the technical documentation specifies “single occupancy”). Even if we assume single workers rent rooms rather than studios, I don’t see how that figure goes much below say, $64k. The other point I’d make is that the $76k target I suggested is meant to be an average across all employees. I find it a plausible average, but implausible as a career peak target, because the comfortable wage for a single person is so close to this figure that I don’t see much room to revise the figure downwards.
Sammy’s point about how a sustainable wage would leapfrog restaurant pay above the pay for other service professions highlights a problem with how we pay service workers as a whole, rather than with the calculation of what it would take to make restaurant work a sustainable long term career. Most service workers are horribly underpaid, and in a just world we would be aiming for everyone in a service job to be making an actual comfortable wage, especially when more and more people are engaged in service professions.
Finally, Sammy asks whether there is “a math somewhere in the middle” — and there is. Restaurants offer career progression to some degree. Captains get paid more than front servers who get paid more than back servers who get paid more than bussers and runners. Captains at high-end restaurants most definitely make a comfortable wage, but they do so partly because the runners and bussers make very little. At my Harlem local, I would guess that the servers are making close to the necessary hourly to hit the $76k annual I posited, but it’s not a given that they’re working full time, so any individual’s annual earnings may be well below $76k. Everyone in the kitchen certainly makes far less. The current math in the middle, in other words, is that we pay some restaurant workers enough and others too little, and that this variation takes place both across restaurants and within them.
And Chris suggested:
I think there’s a good argument to be made that good table service is already a luxury. Fast casual style is the majority of my daily meals (that I don’t cook). I imagine doing robotic service—even with humans in the kitchen—is cheaper?
I’m thinking of places like Wawa that are closing in on fully electronic ordering but still allowing for customization. This example is well chosen because I imagine Wawa and similar places save a lot of money by standardizing low-quality ingredients. But it’s not such a stretch to think of Sweetgreen (or wherever) moving to an all-electronic ordering system.
Aside from custom, the main thing keeping table service around is the tip credit system. The tip credit varies from state to state, but many states allow restaurants to pay service staff far less than minimum wage as long as tips make their hourly wage up to the local minimum. In essence, table service is cheap for the restaurant, so as long as it continues to be perceived as a competitive edge (or competitive necessity), most restaurants are more than happy to spend that money.
Some states, including all three on the West coast, don’t offer a tip credit at all. The same minimum wage applies to both servers and cooks, so it’s no coincidence that a lot of experiments with alternatives to traditional table service originated there. For the same reason, fast casual chains have an enormous incentive to implement electronic service systems — their service teams are getting paid full minimum wage because they don’t make enough in tips for the tip credit to be meaningful. It’s just as valuable to Sweetgreen to replace a server with a screen as it is to replace a cook with a robot arm, and the technology for one of those replacements is a lot closer than the other.
And quite a few people asked me what was on the menu at the pop-up…
Altogether, this was 20 pounds of shallots, 5 pounds of galangal, a couple pounds of ginger, a half pound of turmeric, a whole lot of chilis both fresh and dried, and almost 30 pounds of coconut milk!
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
p.s. I’d love to buy you a coffee. Drop me a line!