Reopening
It’s difficult to compare a restaurant about to reopen after 14 months with a high-volume bakery in the throes of day-to-day production, but the energy at my new job is completely unlike my old one. My first few days of work were spent on training, paperwork and prepping ingredients for opening night. It felt like a cross between freshman orientation and the last days of dress rehearsal for a theater production. Some of the cooks and servers were seeing each other for the first time since the abrupt closure last year. Others of us were new to everything and eager to learn as much as we could. Among everyone was a sense of optimism and excitement just to be there.
I spent the entirety of my first day making pea-sized balls out of cucumbers (about this size: 🟢). Other tedious tasks followed, like picking herbs off stems, slicing serrano peppers paper-thin on the mandoline, and peeling the skin from blanched cherry tomatoes. I felt the need to work fast and sometimes got corrected in the ways I was doing things, but I wasn’t continuously stressed in the omnipresent way of my previous bakery job.
The restaurant has done a lot of conscious work to create this kind of environment. I’m trying to leave out specific details about my employers in this newsletter, but the owner has been a public advocate for restaurant workers’ rights and outspoken about the problems within the industry for years. At her restaurant, this manifests in higher pay, specific policies around leave and hours worked per day, and generally not making you feel like a piece of shit for working there. Multiple coworkers said they would be out of restaurants altogether if not for this one. I may still be starry-eyed after only five days of work, but it really feels to me like things can be different if people with power make more caring choices.
On (re)opening night, the entire staff sat down together for a family meal of tofu teriyaki with vegetables and rice and the best vegan chocolate chips cookies I’ve ever had. We got a pep talk from the managers. “Don’t worry if you don’t get everything right, we’ll be here with you,” they said. “Have fun.” I wasn’t scheduled for the service shift but I saw the first guests arrive. Many were regulars, we were told, and they greeted the general manager warmly. The afternoon sun slanted through the floor-to-ceiling window and bounced off the glassware on the tables. The kitchen was humming but hushed, everyone concentrated at their stations. I wished them well as I headed out. It felt like a beginning.