A Seat At The Table
On progress, and the people making it happen
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It is one of the most common stories among those of us who work in food that we never really planned to do it. We started a restaurant job to pay for school or to cover rent, and we never left. We came into this field because it was accessible and interesting, not because it was a respected career path. We never expected to fall in love with it.
But oh, how we fell.
We love the rush of a busy service, and the creative freedom that cooking allows. We are entranced with global and local foodways, and how food culture has evolved alongside histories of language, art, and capitalism. For many of us, food serves as an expression of identities that have been historically discouraged by society. It is a way to save space, and to offer more seats at more tables. To say that we love dinner parties, or reading recipes, or trying new restaurants is to just barely scratch the surface. To many of us, food is everything.
For Brooklyn chef Eric See, a life in kitchens began at the age of 11. A childhood dream of being a travel agent lingered in the back of his later adolescent and adult mind, intertwining with studies of linguistics and sensory family memories. “It was a natural progression,” he says to me over the phone. “Food was just the outlet for that storytelling and creativity. I always kept falling back on it, I always had my foot in a restaurant.”
A foot in the door eventually became a full time commitment when See opened his first baby, The Awkward Scone, a New Mexican café in Bushwick. The business closed in the summer of 2020, a decision which he describes as being “catalyzed but not caused” by COVID-19. He took the most personal and successful details of his experiences with food and running a business and channeled them into Ursula, his new venture in Crown Heights. The restaurant is named after his grandmother, and the menu is rich with sensory memories, rooted in See’s childhood in New Mexico. The cuisine is vastly underrepresented on the East Coast, but he says he hopes to change that.
Photo by Will Blunt, Starchefs
He also hopes to change the traditional structure of restaurants, relying instead on a model that is based on respect and collaboration. After spending many years in other places where owners were making immoral or illegal decisions, he felt it was time to take more of a stand: “I understand being on the other side now why some of those decisions are being made in a haste to save their business or save their money, but it doesn’t make it right.”
In making the final call at Ursula, See describes a constant attempt to strike a balance. He is always weighing the options, whether it’s a few more dollars spent on local eggs, or a few more dollars being paid out to the staff. At times it feels like an insurmountable challenge, but it’s one he is willing to shoulder. In many ways, he is still learning, constantly evolving as any business owner should.
“I wanted to make sure I was doing what I could so that my staff felt comfortable in their personal lives, and providing as much financial security as possible,” he said, recognizing the near impossibility of this feat. “I was just like, I don’t want to have a business if I can’t reach those goals of respecting my staff and making them feel heard. These people are the people that make your business and your dream possible. I’ve worked for too many places where they don’t value you.”
These foundational issues have been confronted head-on through the business model at Ursula, where See has worked hard to establish a mutual respect with both customers and employees. He asks for feedback from his staff and gives them space to freely create and express themselves, whether it be a featured pastry or the opportunity to design an entire menu of their own as part of Ursula’s ongoing queer pop-up series.
His philosophy is also rooted in transparency, on both the macro and micro levels. He is straightforward with his team about the money coming in and out each week, and about various risks and liabilities.
“It’s not in a way to guilt-trip the staff,” he says, “but just to be like, listen, this is what it takes to run a business. On the other side, you have to educate the consumer. You know, it’s not $10 for eggs and a burrito, it's $10 so I can pay the staff a living wage, and so that they are valued as human beings. It’s not just what you see wrapped up in a tortilla.”
Access to food is a current running through See’s mind as well, as he struggles to grapple with rising food costs and inequitable distribution on all levels of the food system. Like other chefs over the last year, in the early days of the pandemic See temporarily converted his shuttered kitchen at the Awkward Scone into a hub to distribute grocery items and meal kits to food insecure communities and former employees. He lists food access as one of his least favorite parts of the industry, finding it “mind-boggling” that the people who make and grow our food cannot afford it. This inequity goes from top to bottom of the distribution chain, and the common denominator is almost always money.
On a larger scale, he also hopes to eventually see an American culture that puts more value on food and those who make it, with less control from corporations. “Right now, we’re driven by convenience, and because of that, we lose touch with the food system and the way that it should function naturally,” he said. “I’d like to see a food industry and culture that’s more in touch with seasonality and sustainability, that values the producers and the growers. You can’t get there without transparency, you have to put that information out on the forefront.”
For Dani Dillon, the story is not too different. Her first job was as a busser at a restaurant in Great Barrington, Massachusetts at the age of 14. She spent her childhood surrounded by her paternal grandmother’s Puerto Rican cooking and her own mother’s extensive archive of Gourmet magazines. She later studied art history at Barnard, working in food service throughout college as a way to make money while pursuing other passions.
She evolved from daytime prep cook into the head of operations and executive sous chef at La Vara in New York City, where she worked for over four years. This was her first experience with “story-driven fine-dining,” and it was too good to give up. Galleries and museums began reaching out with job offers which she turned down to continue a career in food.
“I’ve just always loved working in the kitchen,” she said. “I think there’s such awesome energy and it’s also a series of never-ending challenges and learning. You think you know that your station is ready for service and then you have that assumption challenged the moment that tickets start pouring in. I think of so many times where I thought I knew a recipe or an ingredient perfectly, and then it would be totally impacted by something like the ambient temperature, or soil conditions, or the size of the pot.”
Last spring, after many more years spent in corporate restaurant settings, Dillon launched Lunch Group, an operations, curation, and impact consultancy for mission-driven food and beverage businesses. The group was started out of necessity when she was laid off in April.
“Looking around at that moment in time, I realized I was likely not going back into the brick-and-mortar food and beverage business for a while,” she said. “I always thought kitchens would be ‘recession-proof,’ but there just weren’t any jobs.”
She began reaching out to like-minded folks in the industry, hoping to make the project as collaborative and intersectional as possible. The result is a collective of individuals who are united in a desire to reimagine the fundamental systems of power in service and hospitality.
Her vision is a food system that serves its workers from the ground up, leaning on built in financial incentives such as revenue shares and cross-training employees, or the implementation of less carceral and punitive HR policies — “There’s this huge opportunity now to fundamentally rethink how we work in the food and restaurant business; I certainly don’t want to see things go back to the way they operated before.”
For Dillon, the deeper connection between food and community is both physical and philosophical. She recognizes the tangible nature of food in establishing identities and positions in the world, something which other artists tap into all the time. Drawing from her past experiences in other creative fields, she hopes to maintain a more interdisciplinary view of food and all that it encompasses.
“For Lunch Group, food is not just the literal bread and butter of what we do, but it’s a way to unpack the world around us,” she said. “It’s a lens through which to investigate, examine, and interrogate what goes on structurally, but also to celebrate what food means for folks. It’s such a unifier.”
Of course, when thinking about turning these lofty ideas into more tangible realities, it is easy to dismiss them as simply too idealistic. It is certainly much simpler to slip into old habits rather than taking the path less traveled, or creating an entirely new one. The biggest hurdle for all of these more ethically ideal businesses is ultimately the same — they still need to make a profit.
This is something Lunch Group seeks to tackle on a more systemic level, as Dillon builds her client base and business model with an understanding of the reality that many restaurateurs are facing. She recognizes “crazy parameters” surrounding owning and operating a restaurant, and is still working to find ways around it.
“We have to acknowledge what’s possible economically, and what legal and financial restrictions are in place,” she said. “But if the operating structure isn’t built well, it will ultimately impact the people at the entry level of the company, and leaders need to be accountable for that. It’s not going to be the easy solution. The easy solution is doing what is familiar. We have to figure out the way to position it so that it feels attainable in small steps.”
Dillon has a more collaborative vision of progress, and has drawn a lot of inspiration from mutual aid resources. She sees routes for progress in challenging traditional power dynamics of hospitality through customer service, both internally and on a public facing level.
“People need to understand that you are a big part of the power exchange if you are the person who will be served by the person working,” she said. “There’s a lot companies can do to empower their team — like, what is someone allowed to do? Are they able to stand up for their humanity and dignity, or are they encouraged not to, and told to comp something instead? What are you putting into place as a business owner that allows you to properly check the other person involved in that interaction, and to protect yourself and your team? It's these foundational systems of power at play around what this industry is and what this industry is designed to do; who it's designed to care for and who it's designed not to care for.”
Illustrations by Julius Barkley courtesy of Lunch Group
Soon after Lunch Group was founded came a time that is widely referred to as the “summer of reckoning.” The public murder of George Floyd gave way to many more months of social unrest and a widespread confrontation of America’s fundamentally flawed values and antiquated structures. People began publicly sharing experiences of working in kitchens, factories, and newsrooms rife with injustices. Calls for reform and abolition rang through the streets. Capitalism was being questioned at its very core.
For Aja Wiley, the events of this summer were deeply personal, and impactful. She had just relocated from New York to Los Angeles, returning to her roots as a fifth generation Angeleno. She tells me that June of 2020 was “one of the most mentally draining months” of her life.
“(The) pandemic, BLM, countless texts from white people asking if I was ‘okay,’” she said. “Of course, I wasn’t.”
As protests and government-imposed curfews rippled across the country, Wiley and her friends jumped to join the movement. They started cooking meals out of their apartments, feeding crowds and comrades. The next month, she launched Fifty/Fifty, a multidisciplinary community space centering BIPOC creatives, with queer and trans, Black narratives as the focal point.
Passionate about the arts and community work ever since she was young, Fifty/Fifty is a culmination of all that Wiley had searched for as a child, and still very much needs.
“Black AF, queer AF, experimental, DIY, anti-capitalist, and honest,” she said. “I’m also open to wherever things take me with Fifty/Fifty. It’s a community space, so the idea is to constantly be adapting for community needs."
Much like the others, Wiley started working in food at a young age. She held mainly front of house positions before being trained as a line cook a few years ago in a woman-run kitchen which she describes as intense, but collaborative.
“When I first started, it felt very community-oriented,” she said. “It wasn’t like a chef at the pass, yelling about our ticket times. To me, it felt like we were all grinding because we wanted to, because it felt good to do that together. Until it didn’t. The thing is capitalism and feminism can’t coexist, and this place definitely chose money over people.”
When Wiley started thinking about how to incorporate food into Fifty/Fifty, she kept coming back to the events of the past summer and to her time spent cooking on the line. Eventually, Sunday Supper was born — a bi-monthly, donation-based meal for her community in LA. When pandemic safety concerns subside, she plans to eventually expand into a physical space that will allow for a residency or pop-up program, showcasing young, queer and trans, BIPOC chefs who historically haven’t had access to these spaces.
“I want to be a part of reclaiming that space for us,” she said. “There are so many talented, smart, people who agree and are doing that work, and I’m just happy to be a part of that movement, even in a small way. While I want to provide meals to everyone, I will always prioritize queer and trans BIPOC. I just want everyone to have a seat at the table.”
Wiley has a radical yet opportunistic vision for the future of this industry, one that creates more access to food for marginalized communities at Fifty/Fifty and beyond. In her ideal world, money wouldn’t matter.
“Capitalism is such a hellscape,” she said.
In Wiley’s version of a more idealistic food system, she envisions more sliding scale pay options as well as government support. Good, fresh, and high-quality food has long been treated as a privilege, instead of a basic human right.
She also cites fair pay as a major hurdle. Wiley hopes for a future with more worker centric models, and a more structurally level playing field.
“Somehow society has valued food and hospitality jobs way below the poverty line and not as a specialty skill, which is wild to me,” she said. “Being a line cook was the hardest job I’ve ever had. I would love for the model of worker-to-boss to change to a co-op style, or something similar so employees aren’t treated so disposable and there’s a sense of agency. All white, cis, toxic masculinity kitchens can see their way out.”
Wiley doesn’t feel bad for saying it, and rightfully so. She holds some resentment for the way this industry has dehumanized people with a genuine love for food, but is beginning to see the more positive changes taking shape.
“I think people are really starting to shake things up in the industry, and post-pandemic I can’t wait to see what comes from it,” she said. “I want to see more people like me running the show. Or better yet, a community of people running things.”
Fifty/Fifty was not the only project born out of last summer’s protests. Adam Keita describes a similar inspiration in the creation of much-anticipated café, wine bar, and community space, Daughter. The vision has always been communal and collaborative, but a more powerful spark was lit when Keita connected with Zenat Begum, the owner of Playground and a voice of progress well before the current movement. He felt a call to action and channeled it into Daughter, with a newfound courage to fight for their community in Crown Heights and beyond.
All of Daughter’s co-founders – Keita, Brian Stoothoff, Sarah Huggins, and Dana Heyward – had been working as baristas for quite some time. During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, they all watched as other restaurant and café owners struggled to adapt to a new reality, and yet still found the time and resources to feed their workers and communities. They were inspired by the strength of their neighborhood, eager to pursue a business model that centered itself around collaboration and resilience.
At Daughter, food access is also crucial to the business model. The group plans to provide a daily “family meal,” offering free food to individuals in need. Additionally, they will be giving 10% of their monthly profits to organizations and initiatives that they are passionate about, such as The Water Project and In It Together.
The ethos of Daughter is rooted in the fundamental connections between food and people. In describing their business model, Keita references hunters and gatherers of earlier times, who foraged not just to feed themselves, but “to feed the group, the community, and so on.”
“We serve food to break bread with our community, to share stories, to learn and to embrace each other,” he said.
This spirit is palpable after just one visit to their temporary outdoor coffee cart, where Stoothoff is serving pour-over coffee and pastries from nearby bakery, Leo. He says he is planning to stop by Ursula for lunch, eager to try the chicken sandwich and vegan nachos. He is encouraged by his community, and inspired by the networks that he sees developing.
For the folks at Daughter, the business side of things comes down to a deep commitment to community resilience, and a little bit of blind faith.
“People need to be willing to take a chance,” Keita said. “Honestly everything we are doing – even from our standpoint – seems so challenging, but we don’t reach for change because it’s easy. We have to be willing to take on the hard work, with the hope of inspiring others to do the same.”
Of course, he recognizes that no single restaurant can solve the food insecurity of New York, or the deep-seated sexism, racism, and lack of representation in the food industry. But the more people tackle this challenge from different angles, the less complicated it becomes.
Over the last year, questions have been raised as to whether this industry should be allowed to survive or left for dead. It is a system rooted in capitalism and exploitation, designed to hold some on a pedestal at the expense of others. But for Dillon, See, Wiley, and Keita, the future of food is brighter — it is collaborative, communal, and transparent. All are welcomed and heard. Food is brought to center stage, and the labor behind it is valued.
Dillon is extremely hesitant to eliminate restaurants entirely from our economic equation. She references the many people who depend upon employment in the food industry, such as formerly incarcerated individuals or undocumented immigrants who are unable to find work elsewhere.
“There is certainly an argument to be made that we should preserve restaurants, no matter how broken they are,” she said. “But it is critical that we work towards a fundamentally better system. I’m not convinced by the argument that it is an ‘either/or’, that it needs to be the same or non-existent.”
In pushing for these systemic changes, both See and Dillon freely admit to having some privileges in their lives, and particularly within the food industry. They view their positions as an opportunity to open up the conversation and redistribute the power, forging a path for themselves and those around them.
“This industry is still rampant with social inequities,” See said. “And it’s still not a level playing field for Black and POC chefs, or for queer chefs. We have to hold each other accountable, share information, and share resources. That’s part of what I’ve been trying to do with the queer pop-up series. I have this beautiful privilege of having a fledgling, right now successful business that a lot of people are paying attention to in a positive way. Rather than being like ‘yes, I finally got what I wanted, this is all mine,’ I’m like ‘oh damn, people are looking over here, let me get all of my friends in the picture too.’ No queer left behind!”
Like many of his fellow industry folks, See remains cautiously optimistic—
“Hopefully these spaces will continue to exist, and I think that they will, as long as we all hold on to each other while we’re floating out into the ocean,” he said. “It’s easy to get really discouraged because we see these places like Meme’s or Babydudes close down, but here comes Daughter, and what Zacarías (Gonzalez) is working on with Ediciones and Auxilio and it’s like, no there’s still more. We just have to continue building each other up, and bringing each other on the path.”
And the path is growing. Just this week, The New York Times published a glowing review of Winner, featuring a nod to Brooklyn chef Telly Justice and her upcoming art and community based restaurant, Hags. Down the road from Ursula is Hunky Dory, where Claire Sprouse has eliminated tipped models of hospitality in favor of a more worker-centric model. Moonlynn Tsai has worked out of her restaurant, Kopitiam, to co-produce Heart of Dinner, a non-profit organization providing meals for Asian-American elders. In all of these projects, food and community are at the center.
“I think the role of food has a few different values, especially now with all the social unrest and the realization of the stark white supremacy that’s in this country and this world, and how it rules our food systems and our communities,” See said, with a twinge of frustration, but also an air of hope. He is optimistic that more space is being made for traditional and indigenous routes of storytelling through food, and that the general public is finally starting to pay attention.
“I think that food is definitely becoming a way of communicating that history again,” he said. “People are more interested in learning about different cultures and what contributed to their erasure or marginalization through our food system. And food is a great teacher — it’s a great language.”
Wiley is interested in these same historical roots of food, referencing traditions like the cookout or family holidays as early lessons of the importance of food in our lives.
“I think community spaces that are integrating food into their work can really start to shift the food industry as a whole,” she said. “We’re showing that good food isn’t this luxurious thing that only certain people get access to, because fuck that. Since the summer there’s been a huge surgence in food mutual aid, and I really hope it stays that way.”
When it comes to next steps, the answer seems to be deceptively simple — find the things that work, and then bring others along for the ride. While it is often not the easier route, it is a challenge we need to be willing to confront, and one that many are already well on their way to solving. It is this optimism and rejection of the status quo that holds the most power, and potentially the most opportunity for real and lasting change within this simmering movement. For all of these businesses, and others like them, the strength lies in numbers. It is about gaining — and maintaining — momentum, and sharing the spotlight.
It is undoubtedly easier to carry on as we were, cogs in an exploitative and unjust machine. But solutions exist, lying dormant like tulips just below the winter frost, close enough to taste. Progress is possible, even if it is the longer and harder road. At least on this road, we aren’t alone.
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