|
|
|
The Editors' Desk
As a supporter of Civil Eats, you know that we rarely dive into traditional restaurant reporting—we leave most of that work to publications like our partner Eater, whose main focus is reporting on the business of producing and serving food to others. When we do report on restaurants, we tend to cover people and businesses who are pursuing alternative models from a social justice and labor-rights perspective.
During the pandemic, much of our coverage on restaurants connected the dots on issues we have been writing about for years: food and farmworkers on the frontlines of a brittle food system.
In this month’s Deep Dish, we take a step back and look at developments in the post-pandemic world of restaurants—an industry that is, by many accounts, in a “terrifying” state. We follow up on our previous reporting to explore where and how people are eating out. For instance, we look at the rise of pop-up kitchens and microenterprise home kitchen operations (MEHKOs), two forms of dining that are growing rapidly, and facing the dilemmas of scaling up.
We also talk to one of the leaders of the powerful Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas about their labor organizing, which can serve as a model for other industries nationwide, and former San Francisco Chronicle Food Critic Soleil Ho about their vision for a brave new world of restaurants.
As always, we love hearing from you. If you have restaurant stories (or recommendations), we’re all ears: Please send them to us at members@civileats.com.
Thanks for reading, and for being a Civil Eats supporter. If you'd like to increase your support for our work with a tax-deductible donation, please click the button below.
~ The Civil Eats Editors
|
| Donate Today |
|
|
|
|
Member Updates |
|
Civil Eats Salon, October 3: School Food Access
It was great to see so many of you at our salon on October 3; we really appreciate the space that you helped to co-create! If you weren't able to attend the salon (or you loved it so much you can't wait to watch it again), you can view the recording here.
Help us plan the next salon
We are starting to plan out our next member Salon, which we will convene in early 2024. We’d love your thoughts and suggestions: What topics would you like to see us cover? Email us to let us know what’s on your mind.
Civil Eats member Slack community
We are growing our new Slack community for members to engage more directly with our team and with each other and we want you to join!
The community has five channels:
-
What’s New: Updates and announcements
-
Lunch Break: Inspiring recipes, books, restaurants, etc.
-
The Edit Room: Conversations about our reporting and newsletters
-
Community Hub: Share and learn about Civil Eats’ members and team
-
What We Are Reading: The Civil Eats team shares food-related article recommendations
If you’d like to participate in our Slack Community, please review the Community Rules and Agreements and accept this invitation link, which is good through November 22. (Here are the instructions if you’re using Slack for the first time.)
(return to top) |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Culinary workers, bartenders, and hotel attendants in Las Vegas picketing earlier this month outside eight casino resorts.
(Photo courtesy of Culinary Workers Union Local 226)
|
|
The Check-In: A Culinary Worker Strike Could Reshape the Nation's Restaurants |
|
By CHRISTINA COOKE |
|
In early October, thousands of bartenders, culinary workers, and hotel attendants formed a picket line outside eight casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip. It was the largest union demonstration on Las Vegas Boulevard in 20 years.
Since April, the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and the Bartenders Union Local 165 have been negotiating with the city’s three largest companies—MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, and Wynn Resorts—for a new five-year contract. To no avail, says Ted Pappageorge, who has served as the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer since 2022 and was its president for more than a decade before that. “We've been respectful, and we’ve been patient,” he says. “But it’s time now to come to the table.”
Meanwhile in Detroit, about 3,700 food and beverage and other workers at the city’s three casinos walked out on strike a few days after the Las Vegas action, demanding improved wages and working conditions.
Across the United States, the labor movement has gained strength in recent years. And while food system workers have historically been less organized than other industries, they are now more frequently using their collective power to push for demands that benefit workers.
In addition to higher wages, health care, and pensions, the Las Vegas culinary union is also fighting for a reduction of workload, expanded on-the-job safety protections including panic buttons to cut down on sexual harassment and assault by customers, and stronger technology protections that guarantee workers advanced notification if a new technology will be introduced that will affect their job, as well as health care and severance pay if they are laid off because of new technology.
While the picketing in early October was meant to apply pressure to the companies, union members have authorized their leaders to declare an active strike at any time. And with the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix race coming up in November, as well as numerous holiday festivities, a strike would cause challenges for the owners of many properties.
Pappageorge took a break from negotiations last week to explain what led to the latest action, how it fits into history, and what this picket line means for the labor movement across the country. |
 |
|
Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer, says massive corporations cannot leave their workers behind as they reap massive profits.
(Photo courtesy of Culinary Workers Union Local 226)
|
|
What led up to workers picketing the Strip in early October?
We came through quite something during the pandemic. We were 25 percent back to work in 2020; 50 percent in 2021; and 80 percent back to work in 2022. Normally we were around 60,000 workers, around 50,000 dues-paying members in Las Vegas, and we leveled off around 40,000. The workers just didn't come back.
It was for a few reasons. One was companies bringing in technology that eliminates jobs, and another was companies not bringing back workers and not having the same amount of service [but upping their prices]. Like you may not get your hotel room cleaned daily, but they're still charging you rates that are 30 percent higher than what they were pre-pandemic. And now they have fewer workers doing more work.
All those things put together have given these companies incredible margins. I mean, the Las Vegas economy is on fire. Companies are setting incredible records. [But workers aren’t seeing corresponding improvements.] There are a lot of young people entering the workforce, and many ask, “How am I gonna own a home?” Forget about that. In Las Vegas, we've got this whole issue of Wall Street landlords buying up housing, buying up apartments, Airbnbs. Rents are up roughly 40 percent in the last three years. If you want to try to put your kids in college, or you're mid-life, it's harder and harder to get by. And if you're nearing retirement, Social Security is extremely important, but it's not enough.
These companies are on the wrong track. And we're trying to push them to understand that time's running out.
|
|
“To get through the pandemic, people did extra—they did more to save their own jobs, to help save the companies—everybody pitched in. But [it became clear that] regardless of the sacrifices you make, you're dispensable.”
|
|
|
|
What about this moment has prompted the potential for strikes of these magnitudes?
This is not a Vegas phenomenon. It's happening all over the country. To get through the pandemic, people did extra—they did more to save their own jobs, to help save the companies—everybody pitched in. But the pandemic made it very clear to workers that regardless of the sacrifices you make, you're dispensable [in the eyes of the company]. And that's the message that has come out of this—whether you're a nurse, or you worked in a grocery store or a hotel.
These massive corporations have been merging and gaining power. Wall Street private equity influence is very powerful, and workers are fearful of being left behind. And that's something that we see at our sister local in Detroit. We sent staff to help with the strike. Folks have really taken a hit after sacrificing during the pandemic, and there's a lot of anger and nervousness about where these massive corporations are trying to go.
How does what's happening in Las Vegas and Detroit fit into the larger landscape of food and beverage workers across the country?
The reality is a lot of our jobs across the country are poor people's jobs when they're not [connected to a] union. If you're a server, you might do a little better than the cook. But restaurant jobs, room-cleaning jobs—if they're not union, generally, it's folks just getting by.
I was born and raised in Las Vegas. My parents worked in hotels. My grandfather worked in the food industry here. And a lot of us are like that. But the difference is we've been able to create a standard of living—through long, nasty strikes, really. We’ve been able to get health care and have job security in a restaurant or hotel, which normally doesn't happen. We've been able to create jobs with security, health care, and pensions. We have a housing fund that helps people buy homes. We have a free legal services fund. What we've been able to do here is something that helps raise all boats.
The volume of workers here [has historically been very high]. Pre-pandemic, we [numbered] almost 65,000 with the bartender's union, which is affiliated with us. Around the country, it's a little different. But we think service workers deserve to own their own homes and have health care, and to be able to take care of their kids. And so our Culinary Workers Union—we’re part of Unite Here—is fighting and standing up and organizing.
|
|
“We think service workers deserve to own their own homes and have health care, and to be able to take care of their kids.” |
|
|
The push for union protection is building across the U.S., including for food and farmworkers. What do you see as the biggest challenges confronting that movement?
I think companies have gotten addicted to these profit margins since the pandemic. These are massive corporations; they're not mom-and-pop restaurants that we're talking about. People look at MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, or Wynn Resorts, and they get it, they're all over the world. You have to be able to join together to have the power to beat them.
One of the big issues is the decline of the labor movement [in recent decades]. You've got to have scale to be able to take on these companies. It's a romantic notion that workers can just get together and win against big corporations—it doesn't happen. If you want to beat Starbucks, it's not about 30 workers and a locally owned franchise. You've got to beat the corporation. Labor has got to say, "we're going to put X-amount of money and resources and manpower into working with non-union workers and organizing."
|
 |
|
Culinary workers, bartenders, and hotel attendants strike in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 12, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Culinary Workers Union Local 226) |
|
|
How is this movement for food and beverage workers different from others you've seen in your 30-year career?
There's this idea that in Vegas we've been able to succeed because it's easier. It's not; it's tougher. These companies are massive. They're extremely powerful. It's like a steel mill town or a coal town. But we’ve been one of the fastest-growing local unions over the last 25 years across the country in a right-to-work state. In other words, legally workers don't have to pay their union dues, and they would get all the union benefits that we negotiate.
I think there's understanding now that we can do this, and so I'm very optimistic about that. But it takes real sacrifice and real commitment. If you look at all the polling, the favorability of unions and the idea of belonging to the union is at its highest peak in the last 30 years. And it's not because unions are doing something different; it's because workers are seeing the fact that these massive corporations are gonna leave them behind.
It's going to take unions willing to lay down massive funding to support workers and then workers willing to risk their jobs, and risk their families—to go on strike. It's a very serious decision. But if workers have a plan to win and are backed up by the labor movement, there is incredible opportunity right now. |
|
|
What counts as a victory for the Culinary Union, and how could that shape the working conditions throughout the country?
If you win $10 an hour tomorrow, but you can still be replaced by technology and AI, then what do you have? Nothing.
After five years, we've got this protection that helps workers deal with technology. Throughout our industry, we've been sharing that, and we understand that other unions have been able to go in that same direction.
I think folks are ready to have that fight. In Las Vegas, we're trying to send a message to these companies that it's time. And if not, we're going to have a strike deadline and we'll end up joining our Detroit brothers and sisters on the picket line.
(return to top) |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Lee Thomas (at left) built a parklet along the side of his house for private BBQ parties catered by GrilleeQ. (Photo courtesy of Lee Thomas)
|
|
The Follow-Up: New California Law Aims to Get More Home Chefs Cooking |
|
By TILDE HERRERA |
|
Lee Thomas turned his BBQ hobby into a serious side hustle in 2020, when he launched GrilleeQ, a microenterprise home kitchen operation (MEHKO) in San Leandro, California, south of Oakland. Every week, he sells pounds and pounds of tri-tip, baby-back ribs, pulled pork, and chicken thighs, all smoked for hours over hickory or applewood in his backyard.
Operating GrilleeQ on the weekends brings in a small income stream for Thomas, a former elected council member who now works as an Oakland Unified School District administrator. But in its short lifespan, Thomas says, GrilleeQ has provided much more.
"I've been able to use this business to open very different doors of opportunity," he says.
Using revenue from GrilleeQ, for example, Thomas launched a new business called The Dro 510, a clothing line that promotes civic pride for San Leandro. He also uses his MEHKO to support the fundraising efforts of community nonprofits, including Building Futures and San Leandro Girls' Softball League.
Thomas also leveraged the BBQ business as a springboard and sponsor to launch a podcast called The Marinade, for which he invites local elected officials to his home to eat barbecue and discuss politics. And earlier this year, Thomas expanded his business with a parklet built along the side of his house, which people can rent for private barbecue parties.
Thomas says GrilleeQ's sales have been consistent since Civil Eats last covered his business in 2020. But in that time, the larger MEHKO movement has expanded in California and beyond, giving home cooks greater opportunities to kickstart businesses from their kitchens.
|
 |
|
Benz Martin and her husband Justin have built a thriving microenterprise home kitchen operation that sells about 50 meals per week. (Photo courtesy of Benz Martin) |
|
In July, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1325 to provide MEHKOs with more flexibility. The bill raised the number of meals MEHKOs can sell each week from 60 to 90, increased the gross annual revenue cap from $50,000 to $100,000, and clarified the definition of “meal” to allow them to sell individual menu items like desserts.
"AB 1325 is going to be so impactful, because it gives people the opportunity to really expand their business and not run into those barriers," says Roya Bagheri, executive director at the COOK Alliance, a nonprofit with a mission to legitimize home cooking businesses. "We had some home cooks that were operating and then had to take off the entire summer or basically stop operating because they were hitting the limits."
In one Bay Area county, for example, only half of the 49 MEHKOs that applied for permits were operating a year later, hamstrung by the revenue caps and the fact that they can only have one full-time employee. Bagheri estimates that there are more than 200 permitted MEHKOs operating in 11 California counties and the city of Berkeley.
The COOK Alliance pushed for the expanded caps by showing lawmakers how much inflation and other factors had driven up food costs for MEHKOs. In Thomas's case, the price of chicken thighs has increased 45 percent in the last three years, and he says he can't buy a whole brisket of his desired quality for less than $100, compared to $60 to $70 in the past.
Benz Martin, who owns Cooking Thai by Benz in the Southern California city of La Quinta with her husband Justin Martin, a teacher, has had to raise prices to keep up with cost increases and clip coupons while planning her menu. "If beef goes on sale, we will offer Mongolian Beef," Justin says.
They don't want to keep raising prices due to their loyalty to their customers, even though that has likely cut into their profits. "We have such a strong client base from the last three years, so now we are selling food weekly, and we see the same clients that come back every week," Benz says.
Cooking Thai by Benz sells about 50 meals a week and, in order to maintain their quality, has no plans to expand further in the immediate term. But, like Thomas, they appreciate that AB 1325 has given them the option to grow their businesses if they choose.
Meanwhile, the COOK Alliance will continue trying to raise the thresholds, says co-founder Matt Jorgensen. "One hundred thousand [dollars] isn't what we were shooting for, but it's a heck of a lot better than $50,000, and it's going to make it more viable for people to have this be a real substantive source of income for them and their families," he says.
|
|
“[The new law will] make it more viable for people to have this be a real substantive source of income for them and their families.” |
|
Lawmakers have kept the cap low due to concerns about MEHKOs being able to produce high volumes of meals safely, Jorgensen says. As additional counties allow residents to launch MEHKOs, he believes lawmakers and environmental health departments will become more supportive.
Following a successful two-year pilot program, for example, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors voted in September to implement a permanent MEHKO ordinance. Thirty-one businesses participated in the pilot program, 84 percent of which were founded by women entrepreneurs, according to San Mateo County.
Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and Monterey counties have also voted in the last two months to start the process of drafting MEHKO ordinances and issuing permits, Bagheri says. San Diego County will vote in November to renew its two-year MEHKO pilot program or implement a permanent ordinance.
Bagheri and Jorgensen say Riverside and San Diego counties may be the most advanced in the state’s MEHKO landscape. In San Diego, the COOK Alliance teamed up with other community-based organizations and San Diego Miramar College to apply for a California Social Entrepreneurs for Economic Development 2 (SEED 2) grant in 2022.
With the $1 million grant, they formed the San Diego Food Justice Project and created G.E.T. Cooking, or the Grant for Entrepreneurship Training and Home Cooking Program. The eight-course training program is tailored for micro food entrepreneurs who need support with the business side of their operations, including budgeting, financial planning, marketing, and business plan development, Bagheri says. "These are skills that can be taught."
The program was open to all micro food entrepreneurs in the San Diego area, not just MEHKOs. Many of the participants were already operating without permits and received training to apply for MEHKO permits or pursue other endeavors such as street vending, catering, or food trucks.
The training pilot ran from fall 2022 through summer 2023. The 169 food entrepreneurs who graduated received a total of $750,000 in microgrants upon completion, ranging from $2,500 to $7,500 each, to help pay for the cost of permitting and starting or scaling their businesses.
The group is trying to get more funding to offer the program to additional micro food entrepreneurs in the San Diego area. The COOK Alliance also plans to expand the program across California next year and make it MEHKO-specific, with a goal of 500 participants who will each receive $3,000 in micro grants, for a total distribution of $1.5 million.
Outside of California, Bagheri and Jorgensen have high hopes that Washington state will legalize MEHKOs in 2024; for years, lawmakers in the state have introduced related legislation but it has never passed. Similar laws in Georgia, New York, Florida, and Texas have been introduced in recent years only to fizzle out. Utah became the second state to legalize home cooking operations in 2021 with a law that Jorgensen says was similar to California’s.
“We completely open-sourced our whole legislation,” he says. “People can go to our website and find model legislation that we put together so that any state should be able to copy and paste and get advice for how to amend it for their state. We are hoping to make it easy for people to do this elsewhere.”
(return to top) |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Nathanial Zimet transformed his smokehouse Bourrée into a weekend “pop-up incubator” that helped Joel’s Lobster Rolls and other concepts build buzz and attract new customers.
(Photo courtesy of Bourrée)
|
|
The Follow-Up: Why Pop-Up Restaurants Keep ... Popping Up |
|
By GREY MORAN |
|
If you were in North Carolina in 2017, you could have dined on braised short ribs and golden squash under the stars on a narrow bridge over the Haw River. This year, in New York, you might stumble across a banquet of foraged food when it flickers to life. You can also eat bowl after bowl of soup with queer neighbors in eight different cities or catch a meal from Ha’s Đặc Biệt, roving Vietnamese street food, which has taken up residence in a series of cities for anywhere from a single night to a stretch of a months.
The opportunities for pop-up dining are practically endless. And as brick-and-mortar restaurants struggle to survive, more chefs are turning to the pop-up as a business model, blurring the line between a restaurant and an event.
There was a 105 percent increase in the number of pop-up restaurants across the country between April 2022 and March 2023, according to Yelp data. It’s by far the fastest growing type of dining out experience. This surge has come at a time when the restaurant industry has yet to make a full rebound from the early pandemic, and when many restaurants have permanently shuttered.
What’s behind this staggering rise in pop-ups? For many chefs, it’s a way to build a following and test out a concept on a budget. The model first gained popularity during the recession among emerging chefs—“often people with some level of skill and talent who want to be able to showcase themselves but couldn't necessarily afford to open their own space,” says Scott Taylor, Jr., an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina who has researched the rise of pop-ups. The goal, he says, is often to develop a following and raise money for a permanent space.
But in recent years, he has also seen celebrity chefs use pop-ups to experiment with new recipes or escape the restaurant grind. Even René Redzepi, whose restaurant Noma has been rated as the best in the world, reached a breaking point. “We have to completely rethink the industry,” he told The New York Times in January 2023. “This is simply too hard, and we have to work in a different way.” He announced that he will close Noma in 2024 and transition to a pop-up model, in an effort to ease the stress of operating a high-caliber restaurant. |
|
“It wasn't necessarily that the food was better, but the service was different and the feeling of escapism and playfulness was more exciting to these guests.” |
|
The diners in Taylor’s study also reported having a better experience at pop-ups. “It wasn't necessarily that the food was better,” he says. “But the service was different and the feeling of escapism and playfulness was more exciting to these guests.”
New Orleans-based chef Nathanial Zimet—who owns the Southern bistro Boucherie and smokehouse Bourrée—sees pop-ups as a more collaborative model than traditional restaurants. In the often cut-throat industry, he says it’s a way for chefs to build each other up. In the summer of 2022, Zimet converted Bourrée into a “pop-up incubator” on the weekends, inviting emerging chefs to set up shop and test drive their restaurant dreams. This helped new businesses, such as Joel’s Lobster Rolls, now a beloved food truck, gain a loyal fanbase.
The efforts also benefited Zimet, who cut a profit just by keeping the bar open on the weekends during the most sluggish time of year in New Orleans.
“It helped me stay afloat over the summer. I was able to lower my labor costs dramatically,” says Zimet. “That’s how I see communities—everybody helping everybody. It’s not just a one-way street.”
Next summer, he plans to revamp Bourrée to create an outdoor oasis, replete with a lush garden, live music, flowing beer, and more pop-ups. He hopes people can dine in shipping containers refitted with glass panels overlooking the scene—a clear vision of what might just be the future of restaurants.
(return to top)
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Photo courtesy of Soleil Ho.
|
|
The Forecast: Soleil Ho on Taking Restaurant Criticism to a Higher Level, and What Comes Next
|
|
By TWILIGHT GREENAWAY |
|
Soleil Ho spent four years in the role of restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle before becoming a broader cultural critic for the publisher earlier this year. And while Ho, who uses they/them pronouns, did indeed visit restaurants and write about the experiences they had there, that was often where the similarity between their work and more traditional restaurant criticism ended.
Instead of stopping at the flavors, service, and ambiance, their columns often aimed to broaden readers’ awareness of everything from the intention behind the business and the way it treated workers, to the role it played in preserving or pushing cultural boundaries.
And while Ho—who founded Racist Sandwich, a podcast that delved into the politics, race, and identity within the broader scope of food and restaurants, before moving to the Chronicle—has had their gaze firmly fixed on the Bay Area the whole time, their influence has been felt beyond the region. For all these reasons, we figured they’d have some interesting things to say about the future, and the present, of the restaurant. |
|
What made you want to work as a restaurant reviewer for the Chronicle, and what has made you want to expand that role to write other forms of cultural criticism in the last year?
I never planned on becoming a restaurant critic. It was just this thing that happened. From 2016 to 2019, I was really interested in meta-narratives about food. Having been involved in food media and in the restaurant world to a pretty big extent, I was really curious about how we talked about food and restaurants. And I certainly included restaurant criticism in that bucket.
I applied for the job at [the Chronicle] for the experience. I was surprised that they wanted to hire me, and I accepted the job because it seemed to be a really exciting opportunity to see how far I could go in setting certain guardrails for how I wanted to write about restaurants. I was asking: How do you do it in a consistently equitable way? And in a way that de-centers a lot of the a priori assumptions about who goes to restaurants and who's interested in food media.
It was based on this idea that restaurants and food could serve as cultural texts worth decoding. A wide range of choices being made at all kinds of levels—from governmental to individual—manifest in food culture, and it says a lot about what we want as people, but also what we are told are the limits of aspiration.
So, all of that was included in my vision for the role. And I think it naturally expands to other things, because from the beginning, I was appropriating an analytical lens that has been more readily applied to other types of media and other kinds of material culture. I was zooming into foods, and applying other sorts of principles of analysis to something that had hitherto been maybe underexamined, in my view.
Now you are back to using that wider critical lens. How will your work continue to intersect with restaurants?
It will still intersect with restaurants on occasion. I recently wrote a piece about the first lab-grown meat being served at a restaurant in the United States, which happened to be at a spot in San Francisco, so I went and tried it. And I spent a lot less time writing about the service and the flavors and more time on the big questions about lab-grown meat, like why its funders aspire to recreate animal flesh.
I am still curious about the idea that a restaurant, or really any small or medium-sized enterprise, can be a vehicle for cultural change. Because I think that's something that many people in food media have to take as an assumption. There's so much coverage that centers around the restaurant as a locus for change, or as the canary in a coal mine.
We saw that a lot with COVID and how we talked, and continue to talk, about the way people adapt. I’m interested in playing with that idea and problematizing it and finding new ways to talk about alternative modes of empowerment and sovereignty when it comes to food and economic and financial stability for people who generally are the most vulnerable in our economic system. I danced around it a lot when I was a restaurant critic, and I'm hoping to be more explicit in really thinking about the restaurant as a concept—not just restaurant concepts.
I often have thought of the food system—and restaurants as the most visible aspect of the system—in the same way that I've thought about real estate bubbles or tech bubbles. So much of the true costs are externalized—from the workers often needing to rely on SNAP to the costs of environmental destruction caused by conventional ag falling on the taxpayers. COVID was kind of like a bursting of the bubble in some ways. But I wonder if that bubble was going to burst anyway. Do you have thoughts about that?
This newfound or reinvigorated labor movement in the U.S. was so informed by COVID. I don't think we would have had a hot union summer without COVID. Broadly, and then also in the food industry, I think people were fed up with being put at risk for, essentially, burgers and fries. I feel like the pandemic is so inextricable from how we understand labor and food now.
People have written to me, saying that if they had a choice, they wouldn't think about labor. So, it's through the efforts of people who are advocating for food workers, and writing about food labor, in spaces like within food media, and that repetition has been really helpful. Readers have been reminded about the people behind the plate.
|
|
Given the rise in the number of fast-casual restaurants, and the shortage of people interested in working in restaurants after the pandemic, I’ve wondered: Is the idea of being served as it once existed an outdated concept? Or will it always be a product of the (growing) class divide?
I think it is very much a product of class. And, at least if TikTok and Yelp are any indication, we still have a lot of vocal people who care about service. But I wonder if the backlash to tipping, for instance, and automation are going to add to this sort of deterioration of old service models that require a human who wants to be tipped?
Eating in restaurants has gotten much more expensive than it was before the pandemic. Are you seeing more people get priced out?
In the Bay Area, we saw a lot of restaurants close early in the pandemic. Some were older restaurants that were near the end of their long-term leases and I think they were kind of lucky for getting out when they did, because things are so hard now. I've heard from so many restaurateurs and cooks that raw ingredients are now so expensive. And there are so many ways in which that trickles down. Prices are crazy, and I eat out maybe once a week these days. For a lot of people though, the more relevant thing is grocery stores. Restaurants are a budget item that's optional, but buying food for your home is not. And that's the tough thing. There was such an apex of restaurant culture in the past 10 years and I think that's over. I think we're going to see a major compaction in the industry that is only going to continue.
What do you see as the best-case scenario for restaurants in the next decade?
Part of what will enable restaurants to thrive is a reduction in the overall number of them. There are just too many. And too many that were opened by people who just thought they were making easy money. It does feel like we're headed towards more austerity and maybe the positive thing is that more restaurants are going to have to have a clearer vision of what they're supposed to be. I think that's good for restaurants, because any sort of project that is done half-heartedly is pretty disappointing to experience.
(return to top)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What We're Reading |
|
Bay Area Restaurateurs Discuss the True Cost of Food—and What You Don't See on Your Dinner Bill
By SELINA KNOWLES, Foodwise
Restaurants have been feeling the impacts from inflation, too. Between operating costs, fairly compensating employees, sourcing quality ingredients, and keeping food affordable for diners, running a food business in the Bay Area is a tricky balancing act.
The Restaurant Revolution Has Begun
By ANTHONY STRONG, The New York Times
All it took was a pandemic, an enormous wave of inflation, and an impossibly tight job market to force chefs and many others to burrow to the very core of what a restaurant does for its guests, workers, and community and redefine it from the ground up.
Who Gets Stiffed in the Tipping Wars?
By CHRIS CROWLEY, The Baffler
Many tipped restaurant workers don’t believe their bosses will pay them as much as they make now. And why should they, when their coworkers in the kitchen are paid a pittance? But customers also can’t exactly be trusted to pay service workers what they deserve.
They Started the World's First Ohlone Restaurant. Their Next Project Is Even More Ambitious.
By ELENA KADVANY, The San Francisco Chronicle
The founders of Cafe Ohlone launched a $5 million fundraising campaign to buy land and build three new restaurant spaces, native gardens, and a culinary and educational center. They are also looking for 40 or more acres of land, hopefully in Sunol, where the Ohlone tribe has deep roots.
(return to top) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
That's all for this issue of The Deep Dish. Thank you for reading, and thank you for being a member of the Civil Eats community. If this is your first time reading The Deep Dish (welcome!), be sure to check out our previous issues:
If someone forwarded this email to you, please support our work and become a member today. Questions? Compliments? Suggestions? We love to hear from our members: Please send us a note at members@civileats.com.
(Return to top) |
|
Did you enjoy this newsletter? Help us out by forwarding it to a friend or sharing it on Facebook and Twitter.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
