Back to Normal

I started managing restaurants about a year and a half ago at the age of 21. I had little to no comprehensive experience in a restaurant dining room and yet I was tasked with managing a talented staff of veteran New York City servers and bartenders, many of whom were 8 or 9 years my senior. I had just graduated college with a degree centered around food politics and anthropology and I was bright eyed, eager, and honestly a little bit cocky.

I was young, a quality which was (and is) often wielded as a weapon against me. I was treated as inexperienced and naïve, talked down to, and micromanaged. I was told I should be grateful for this opportunity; I should toughen up and stick it out; I should keep my head down and learn.

As a young woman in the restaurant industry, I have been told repeatedly that all of these things are just part of the job; part of the learning curve. It’s a mentality that I have grown accustomed to, but one that I have never adopted as my own. I have been ogled when walking through restaurant supply warehouses. I am called “sweetheart” and “honey” when signing for wine deliveries. I have been trained to believe in my own incompetence, and I have stubbornly refused to do so. In the process, I have instead been taught to expect better.

In the most basic sense, the business model for most traditional dine in restaurants is based around exploitation. Owners seek to drive down food and labor costs while capitalizing and relying on bar sales to maintain their paper thin profit margins. Something as simple as the tipping system points to surface level cases of degradation and dehumanization, as front of house employees are expected to sell their souls (and as many bottles of wine as possible) in the hopes of receiving a fair assessment and quantification of their worth. Kitchen labor is often paid less generously and is organized into an antiquated militant structure as cooks are taught to be mindless cogs in a brutal machine, fostering the very toxic work environments and rampant harassment with which we have grown far too familiar. For the duration of the pandemic, and even long before, this unstable system has been tested—and it has failed.

And yet, a base level of complacency in the industry lives on. Thrives, even. A widely shared article in the New York Times recently gained traction for “exposing” the Court of Master Sommeliers for a long and deep history of toxic workplace culture and sexual aggression. Members of the group came forward with stories of both overt and camouflaged harassment, which the article laid out in a clear attempt to leave readers shocked and appalled. Many of these readers—both in and out of the industry—were beside themselves, repulsed by the graphic details and by the extent of willful ignorance.

To me, the stories were far from surprising. I would hardly even call this piece “news”. In my short but formative tenure in restaurant management, when I myself have challenged such things as unfair wages, sexually degrading language, or even explicit harassment, I have been met with jaded shrugs and sentiments of that’s just the way that it is. This is an answer that I struggle to comprehend—if the way that it is doesn’t work, why not change it?

When it comes to restaurant culture and the future of the food industry as a whole, a better alternative is not only possible, but necessary. On a very basic level, this requires a full pivot in collective mentality. We must come together in a fundamental way, agreeing to truly value everything that a restaurant is and has to offer. We need to reformat the way we think about and evaluate labor, learning not to treat restaurant work as unskilled or unprofessional or a good backup plan and instead start appreciating it for what it can be—a career; a passion; an industry.

This week, I have been reviewing job applications for the café that I now manage. In filtering through applicants, I have made it my goal to focus on only those who express genuine passion for a future in food. I am carefully trying to read between bullet points on each resume to determine not only if this person has customer service experience or a food handler’s certificate, but to see if they have a deeper understanding and interest in all that this industry has to offer. As I read countless cover letters from eager aspiring bakers and old school fine dining servers in search of a healthier environment, I wonder if this is perhaps the future of restaurants—what if we only hired people who really loved this work, people who are passionate and invested and talented? What if we simply stopped letting this industry be a backup plan for disinterested people looking for an easy and mindless job? If we took ourselves more seriously, would it be enough?

In short, the answer is probably not. Any business can only go so far without the support of its patrons, or in this case the general public. As diners, we must also be willing to pay fair prices for the goods and services which we have been taught to take for granted. We must acknowledge that as other global prices rise, so do the prices of food and labor. We must recognize the extremely high quality of emotional and physical intelligence that this line of work requires, and we must then grow to respect the people who are willing and able to do it. We must then turn inward and question the reasons behind our personal and societal desire to be served in the first place. And then we must take action.

In many ways, we need to start from scratch. We need to tear down the antiquated systems which have proven to be unhealthy and unsustainable and build them anew. We must believe in the power of something as simple as cooking good food that brings people together; having a business model and a mission that stands firmly against injustice; fitting into a community in a seamless and mutually beneficial way.

This past Saturday, New York City took a collective deep breath for the first time in months. At just after 11 in the morning, the streets erupted in applause. Cars honked and passersby cheered; fireworks went off before the sun had gone down. The feeling of collective joy and strong communal relief was palpable, and beautiful.

This feeling has not lasted, and rightfully so. There is more work to be done—a lot of it. We have taken a small but meaningful step in the right direction, and we must keep moving.

What we now risk, both as an industry and as a country, is sliding back into a past version of normalcy—the way that is was. In the hours and days following this oh-so-eagerly awaited announcement, many of us have caught an unsettling glimpse of a future full of the very complacency and performative action that we have cautioned against for months, and even years. Too quickly we may find ourselves receding into the comforts of going back to normal. But normal is not good enough. In fact, it’s not even close.