Dismantle Convenience

Halfway through morning prep, the building notified us that they were going to turn the water off for a few hours. The managers flew off the handle; this was unacceptable, there was no advance warning, how were we supposed to cook without water? Something needed fixing, though, and this was just how things were. So we filled every 20qt Cambro with water and stuck them in all the corners like there was a hurricane coming. We were asked not to use the bathroom if possible. But the water stayed on as the hours crawled slowly toward the beginning of dinner. I peeled cucumbers and fried donuts that wouldn’t be good the following day, thinking to myself, this is insane, why don’t we just close? But we didn’t close when hurricanes flooded the outside tables or when the Baldor order didn’t come until 7pm or when the sauté cook went to jail without telling anybody (firable offense). Finally, the water shut off an hour before dinner. I have no idea how they got through that night because I’d worked prep and got to leave, but somehow they served an 8-course tasting menu to 100 people without running water.

One of the most harmful beliefs in the food industry, I think, is that the show must go on. The ability to navigate disasters or the toughness it takes to push on through illness or understaffing are badges of honor in the industry and that’s respectable, sure, resourcefulness and toughness, but unsustainable when required day in and day out. The public is generally aware of this — people shudder when I talk about my work and say, “I could never work in a restaurant.” But at the same time we expect restaurants to be always open, always fast, always have what we want. While I think that paying more for food is a necessary part of improving workers’ conditions, it can’t be the only change. Really what’s required is a cultural shift in the expectations that everyone, in this country in particular, holds about what a business owes its customers.

Can we learn to live with inconvenience?

Picture this: Restaurants, even the one where you had a reservation for a special birthday dinner, sometimes close last minute, due to sickness or weather or some other disaster of food delivery or plumbing that you will never have any idea about. Your cafe runs out of your favorite sandwich, or maybe just doesn’t have it all day. All food establishments are closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you show up fifteen minutes late for your reservation booked at the end of a restaurant’s service, you can’t get dinner. Sometimes your order comes out in ten minutes, sometimes it takes forty.

Any of these situations would be enough for angry demands to speak to a manager, of whom you expect fawning and consolation and maybe a comp’d little something to show they really care. There’d be stern reviews on Yelp or Google. You’d feel betrayed by the place, because you were a customer after all, they owed you what you wanted, but they didn’t give it to you. Well, you’ll have them know that you’ll be taking your dollars elsewhere in the future.

Put another way, what are we willing to sacrifice for convenience?

The little industry secret that Covid laid bare is that pretty much universally, restaurant workers are expected to work through sickness. Covid upset the system, being a highly contagious virus whose outbreak could cost a business a lot more than losing a day of someone’s work. Briefly, bosses had to listen to complaints of sore throats and headaches and actually encourage an employee to stay home and rest up. Then as testing became widely available, it was made very clear that your staying home had nothing to do with how bad you were feeling, but whether the test read negative or positive. The CDC shortened the recommended quarantine after positivity because of course they did, the system does not function with that kind of luxurious recovery period.

It’s hard to blame the bosses who enforce these inhumane expectations, because they’re the overworked sous chefs or the chef de cuisine who will have to cover the missing employees or find some other way to make it all work, somehow. They were brought up in this environment of unconditional achievement, and their job and professional pride hinge on their ability to run service no matter what. We can still blame them a little bit, though, as well as the bosses’ bosses, who orient the business around its customers rather than its employees. But that too is just the way of the industry.

I got into this fight with the restaurant business teacher who lectured our class once in culinary school. He gave us this scenario: You’re a restaurant manager, and it’s ten minutes before close when a large party walks in wanting dinner. Your staff will have to stay an extra hour, at least, to wait for the order and make the food and hold off on cleaning the dining room. What do you do? The right answer, according to the teacher, was that you welcome them in and serve them, because they’ll be so impressed by your gracious accommodation that they’ll leave good reviews and recommend you to their friends and become regulars. The right answer, according to me, was that you tell them to come back another night, so that your staff doesn’t hate you. The argument got quite heated while my classmates fell asleep or checked out (we were online) and the teacher and I remained prickly at each other for the rest of the class. ICE has an entire restaurant management track, separate from culinary, so it was enlightening to me to see that this was the approach to hospitality that is literally being taught in classrooms.

I do think food establishments can exist outside of this paradigm. I was shocked the first time at Archestratus when we opened without ingredients for over half the sandwiches on the menu, and the kitchen wasn’t in complete hysteria trying to get the meatballs finished and the amogghio made. After Omicron hit, some coworkers chose to stay home not because they were sick but because they were worried about exposure and we didn’t have sandwiches for a week. I worked up front and had to deal with some annoyance about how little food we had, but most of the customers are regulars who know that this is how the place works and still come back because the food is that good. Over the holidays, I’ve been taking notes on which of the restaurants and cafes near me were closed for extended periods and which ones somehow stayed open every day. Maybe they were lucky, but I doubt that’s the full explanation. Judging a food establishment by its unreliability is a little ridiculous, but it’s not the worst measure. I’ve come to notice that the croissants are better at the bakery that takes all of August off, which is probably more legitimately French.

I know that convenience is not just a luxury, and that in a few months when I’m an exhausted new mother, it might feel practically life-saving. But all of us can go into this year examining our needs and expectations. Where do we put our money and what do we demand for it? How can we support the people providing our food beyond tips? Would we go out of our way for what we really want? Where can we be more yielding, more flexible, so that accommodation goes in both directions and makes a softer relationship all around?

What I’m cooking

Vegetable-packed turnip cakes (v)

In anticipation of Lunar New Year, I’ve been playing with versions of one my favorite dim sum orders, turnip cakes, which are mostly daikon radish and rice flour but usually contain enough tiny pieces of sausage to make it extremely annoying for me to eat in a restaurant. The version I’ve come up with (not exactly the one pictured above) is full of carrots, broccoli, and dried mushroom, which is not traditional but pretty fun. Look out for the recipe on Friday, or become a paying subscriber if you’re not already!