Restaurants as temples of care

could we take care of the acolytes a little better?

Chef,

Thanks for the response to my text, telling me you’ll have some time to get together after St. Valentine’s Day. I don’t know if you read the article that I sent you, the latest in a dwindling production in the how-to-fix-the-restaurant-industry-post-Covid-op-ed supply, but I thought that you’d be interested to read it and recognize your ideal restaurant model that you’ve been selling me since we started being friendly outside of the workplace in 2018. Your idea was full-service as opposed to counter-and-prepay model, but I do want you to think about those pages I texted you from Down and Out in Paris and London about servers, especially the part about them being snobs and rarely ever being Socialists. You can’t have a model that relies on everyone pitching in to do all the work if some people think themselves better than others.

I know that you’re sighing at me, remembering that I’ve only ever been business support and that I’ve never worked in any position of a restaurant—not prep cook, not dishwasher, not even host. I also know that you’re too savvy, trained after a career of working in the service career and seeing bad chefs have their teams turn against them because of their emotional outbursts, to ever let your disdain for me show. Chef, I know how good you are at controlling your own emotions.

Because you are so different from the stereotypical chef, that you’re open to your staff’s failings, you end up working so hard and so much. It’s the curse of competency. Your people feel confident that they won’t be punished for mistakes that they’ve made or for feeling overwhelmed by a new urgent issue, like drawers not holding temp; they know that they can just put these things on your plate and you’ll fix them. It’s not just that you’re competent, it’s also that you are the textbook definition of “reliable”. And you’ve gotten good at juggling the load, somehow having the capacity to only have “one to two days off a month.”

Chef, I’m worried about you, but not just you—it’s everyone that works in our industry. And yes, I’ll claim it; the restaurant industry was the first place I worked that the business in and of itself wasn’t exploitative, wasn’t somehow a con. (Granted, one of my first jobs was facilitating cons, but that’s another story.) It’s only that our American society can’t bring itself to pay for the value of a meal eaten out.

I didn’t even know what that value was until after [redacted], when I became the primary caregiver in my household. It was not until all the food-buying, meal-planning, meal-prepping and cleaning-up landed on my plate 7 nights a week that I saw the importance of a restaurant. It is caring. It may be the first industry of care, making food for people.

Here you are, selling your time so that others may enjoy a meal, either innovative—an explosion of experiences for the tongue, nose, and mind— or comfortingly familiar; you are working in the kitchens, coaching your line cooks on presentations so that your guests can have a conversation with someone they like, can focus on the people sitting around the table with them, can listen without a worry about if they will like the meal and which of these fuckers is going to the dishes. This offloading of the labor of sustenance to create the space for leisure with others is, as the commercials used to say, priceless, especially for those of us who struggle with the load.

Chef, all I want is that the people who help take care of others in this place have a little time to themselves for their families and their passions. It would be great if they could have healthcare and childcare, too, but let’s start with what’s solvable now: everyone should have time for leisure in a city that luxury travelers rank as one of their top choices to visit. The dishwashers and bussers and pantry chefs should get a taste of that server life: four-day-workweeks at the very least, if not the twenty hours of working. The snobs might be onto something about work-life balance.

This place that you and I call home—a place that the rich have been terraforming into a tropical paradise with water stolen from the desert—shouldn’t we all get to know it as well as those readers of Conde Nast Traveler? Shouldn’t, if we are part of making experiences that make this town so wonderful, we have the time to enjoy them?

But really, Chef, the thing that I want most is for you to have a free night so that I can host you and a few other people I know in my home, make you a drink, ply you with food that my husband has made now that he’s recovered from [redacted], and get you in a room with people who will want to know about the books you’ve been reading and tell you funny stories about their travels. I want to show you the care that the restaurants you’ve run have systematized into an experience that can be purchased at the right price: human connection. I want to share this experience because it was you, Chef, who taught me how to make these spaces, and how delicate these spaces are. That was, for me, the lesson I learned from the pandemic.

Maybe with enough shared meals, enough human connection, we can figure out how to make a four-day workweek with a living wage feasible for service employees. I’m already solving other major systemic issues in my bi-monthly feminist consciousness-raising pool party.

Cheers,

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