no. 51: not written down

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It’s March. Most people aren’t wearing masks. Case counts are rising worldwide. Another Evergreen ship has run aground. New restaurants are opening by the score, while people rush to dine out after endless months of self-restraint. The chief characteristic of coronatime is repetition and I have to concentrate to remember how many times we’ve gone round this spiral already. 

I spoke to my friend Andy yesterday, and he was in a dark mood. He’s a restaurant supplier, and too many restaurants have been opening for his liking.  

Andy is basically a meat broker. He looks like Hagrid, built like a barrel, with a full beard, and long, grey, wavy hair that’s perpetually drenched with sweat. No matter what he’s doing, there’s a slightly deranged glint in his eye, and I’ve never seen him without either his belly or his arse peeking out between his pants and his shirt. All his shirts have the same patchwork of stains from oil, sweat, tallow, and blood, a pattern which seems to stay constant even though the color of the shirt changes. He can carry a side of veal on each shoulder. He also wants me to mention that he’s single.  

Andy buys animals from a handful of local farms that raise animals to his standards. He coaxes farmers to raise animals the way he wants by committing to buy their output. The farms supply beef raised on nothing but grass and hay, veal calves only on milk and grass, pigs on pasture, and all the animals are kept longer to develop marbling and flavor. Andy arranges for slaughter and cutting, then markets and delivers to small restaurants that want ethically-raised meat. His customer base is surprisingly broad – he sells whole striploin to high end caterers (somehow they always have more of Andy’s meat than he actually has to sell), flank steak to locavore restaurants, top round to sandwich shops, chuck to pubs, and tongue to taquerias. 

Before the pandemic, in a good week, he’d bring four cattle and maybe a veal calf and a couple of pigs to slaughter. He’d pick up the animals he’d delivered 3 weeks ago, which had been hung to age, and deliver all that meat to restaurants, leaving him with nothing except maybe a couple of bags of stock bones. His operation literally consists of a reefer truck, some freezer space, and a lot of relationships. We worked with half a dozen people like him, and together they formed an ad hoc, ever shifting supply chain connecting small farms and our even smaller restaurant. 

You work with someone like Andy because you get transparency, reasonable pricing, and high quality. We knew what breed the animals were, how old they were, what they ate, and which farm they came from. We didn’t have to worry about whether or not we were getting what it said on the tin. In return, we tacitly agreed to put up with some inconvenience. Sometimes deliveries were a day late. Sometimes Andy would come through the dining room during dinner rush on Thursday night with half a pig on his shoulder. 

But the bulk of the additional effort that buying from Andy entailed was the work of turning sides of pork and veal and primals of beef into neat restaurant portions. When our meat came in, we had to break it down, debone it, trim it, portion it, and figure out what we were going to do with every single piece of it – and this was before we could start cooking. This would take maybe 30 minutes if we were breaking down a single beef primal, and hours for a whole veal. Larger purveyors, working with feedlots and national processors, can offer restaurants meat that’s not just trimmed and deboned, but portioned to 8 ounces, +/-0.5oz. You can receive a box of individually packed steaks, and in the time it takes to slit a plastic bag, have a steak to throw in the pan. 

And now the great resignation has made kitchen hours, especially kitchen hours from cooks skilled enough to butcher a beef primal, much harder to come by. Even fewer restaurants can put in the extra work it takes to work with someone like Andy, because kitchens are even more shorthanded than before. And each new restaurant opening schmears the same amount of kitchen talent across more kitchens. 

Andy can’t just start selling trimmed and portioned steaks himself. He works with a small slaughterhouse that is itself short-staffed, so even if he could find enough cattle to sell boxes of portioned ribeyes, he’d struggle to get the slaughterhouse to spend that much time processing the animals for him. The slaughterhouse fell behind schedule in 2020, and butchers have joined the great resignation too, so at this point the slaughterhouse is at least as strapped as any of Andy’s restaurant clients. If you had an animal you wanted this place to process in 2019, you’d have had to book a spot 2 months ahead. Now the wait is more than a year. 

At this point, Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, and their ilk have propagated a clear set of ideas about how our food system should look. It’s an attractive vision: we should mostly cook at home, eat minimal processed food, and get our food through regional, seasonal supply chains built around small farms and processors – supply chains like the one Andy’s built. These pundits argue that fixing our diet will fix broader social and economic problems, but their prescriptions don’t consider the practical difficulties households face in putting this advice into action. 

Anyone who bothered buying from Andy at all was at least trying to live up to the Waters/Schlosser/Pollan vision of food. But now, unable to hire and faced with a (much needed) swell of demand, Andy’s clients are doing the only thing they can – cutting the least visible corners, such as by switching a grass-fed steak for a conventional one, even if it’s antithetical to their ideals. To the extent that restaurants have to shift their orders to conventional suppliers this way, they’re consolidating the market power of these large companies even further, and supporting the abuses of the system that supplies most of our meat today. 

We could say this is just market forces at work. We were arguably in a restaurant bubble before COVID, and market bubbles deflate. The process will not only mean the number of restaurants coming down, but the general level of ambition too. No one builds skyscrapers after a property bubble collapses. 

One reason restaurants have cultural resonance is that we want them to be avatars of the ideals we hold about food.¹ Like Lorde or Lionel Messi, restaurants do things we’ve all done – making music, kicking a football, making food for people – only they do them much better. Home cooks might not always be able to buy from local farms, or put more than one dish on the table, but we hope at least some of our restaurants do, so we see that someone is actually doing this. But like home cooks, restaurants also face numerous constraints on their ability to live by these ideals. 

Andy’s story illustrates one set of pressures – a tight labor market, logistical snarling, and suppliers who are themselves subject to the same challenges. This is the story of supply side chaos that’s become as familiar as facemasks. But there’s another, less discussed, set of constraints – restaurants are hemmed in by diners’ preferences as well. We want food to be priced a certain way, and menus that offer a particular range of options, and these demands are backed up by the fact that we can always spend our money elsewhere or leave a bad review. It’s ultimately our expectation as diners about how much food should cost that makes it hard for restaurants to pay staff enough so they’re not running short staffed; and it’s similarly our expectation of optionality that keeps menus long and kitchens stretched. It’s worth asking how these expectations came into being, whether they can realistically be met today, and if they were ever reasonable at all. 

1. I acknowledge that this isn’t universally true. We don’t expect the slice joint on the corner to have the same ambitions as an independent sit down restaurant, and we don’t expect TGIFriday’s to be a role model for our food system, though the world might be a better place if we did. And the vision Pollan etc. laid out doesn’t really address issues of access, inclusivity, and social justice, and it’s conspicuous that the broad conversation about restaurants has, until recently, largely done so as well.